Grounder
by Punctuator
Summary: Post-film followup to "Dream Girl." In London, Robert Fischer struggles to find solid ground between dreams and reality, between sanity and madness. Rated M, for the first and likely only time, for explicit intimate content. Mind your surroundings...
1. Chapter 1

**GROUNDER**

**Chapter 1**

On Montague Street, the east wing of the British Museum looming at his back, Robert Fischer stood in a thin cold December rain before the door of a narrow white-fronted two-story brick house. Wedged shoulder-to-shoulder between similar neighbors, the building raised its attic and flat roof to low-hanging cadmium clouds, its top half blending into the blue-gray winter dusk; below, light from its paned and security-barred ground-floor windows glowed weakly out against the gloom. A low run of five wide steps separated Fischer from the black door. He looked up at it while rainwater crept in icy tendrils beneath the collar of his coat and, beneath that, further still, the respective collars of his suit jacket and shirt, and told himself, his lips moving silently, how he came to be here.

Not the wherefores of his childhood, his adolescence, and young manhood: those things were givens, facts. Points, at this time, of sanity. Not the death of his mother, his subsequent distant relationship with his father (now also dead); not his education; not his coming of age as heir to a mighty energy conglomerate whose existence was presently poised at the edge of limbo. No: the facts he needed to recall now were utterly prosaic, utterly unphilosophical:

By black London taxi he came from Heathrow four days ago. The driver's name was Frank Burns. He was beefy, genial, copper-haired, fiftyish. His voice when he asked Fischer's destination carried a southern Irish lilt since coarsened, Fischer had guessed, by long residence in or near the Docklands. His license number, stamped on the I.D. card that bore his picture, center-framed on the cab's dash, was as clear in Fischer's mind as the address of his flat back home in Sydney. Fischer, bred for business, for statistics, and a chemical engineer in the bargain, had a head for numbers.

The street-number of the house on Montague Street he had obtained by back-tracing, through database twists and turns and, finally, with the help of a private detective, the phone number on a white business card that bore the inscription _MG Consultants, Ltd._

And this, most importantly of all— a litany, a chanting, on his lips, in his mind— was how he arrived at the house itself: via softly creaking elevator from a top-floor suite at the 41 to the hotel's ground floor, thence through the lobby, deep wood paneling to his left and right, polished black-and-white tiling underfoot, to the street. He counted the steps from the elevator to the door; thus concentrating (the number of steps, thankfully, matching the number from the day before and the day before that), he offered in passing only the slightest absent nod to the young woman— "Good evening, Mr. Fischer."— at the reception desk. A middle-aged man top-hatted and liveried in green opened for him the rightmost of the hotel's gleaming brass doors and, seeing that Fischer was without an umbrella (the man, no doubt, noticed other things, odd things, strange things, about Fischer as well; but the cost of a stay in a place such as this included, as a given, the utmost discretion), offered to hail him a cab. Fischer, declining with a "No, thank you" that vocalized itself more like a soft grunt, walked off, northward, into the rain. This was too important a trip to trust to the inherent unreality of chauffeured auto-travel. He needed to smell the outside air, to feel the jostle at crowded corners whilst waiting for walk-lights. He needed to feel the slick and grit of London's sidewalks, the variegated repair of the city's paving beneath the soles of his shoes.

As he forwent a taxi, he avoided, also, the Tube. He walked all the way from point A to point B. (_B. Bloomsbury. Appropriate._) He could name not only the streets along which he had passed but all the cross-streets, too. He memorized headlines, passing news stands. He knew the names of all the plays and all the films, legitimate and il-, in all the theatres on Shaftesbury. He knew the current lottery jackpots. He could feel the rainwater soaking through the shoulders of his coat. He could feel the sharp pre-blister dig of shoe leather through his socks at his heels.

He knew how important it was that he should know how he had arrived at the house. Were anyone to ask, he would be able to provide an itinerary of prodigious and precise detail.

_How did you get here, Mr. Fischer?_

He knew the answer.

He knew, on this dismal wet evening at least, that he wasn't dreaming.

Of course he hadn't called either the number on the card itself or the auxiliary contact his detective had excavated for him. He didn't need to hear a hiss of disconnect, a prerecorded message telling him that the number he was trying to reach was not in service. He had simply taken the address and set off. He needed the truth to be as prosaic, if not as ugly, as possible. He needed to see the black door open into the cluttered worn reception area of a bed and breakfast, or to hear a ruckus of children, the noise of a television program, the sounds of family life, while a man or woman, mid-thirties, mid-forties, father or mother, asked him with weary suspicion what it was he wanted, what he was selling, who he thought he was looking for.

He shook rainwater from the shoulders of his coat, trudged up the five broad steps, and pressed the brass button of the doorbell.

#####

He waited with his shoulders hunched against the chill and the trickling rainwater. The wind was picking up; a cold freshness was wending north, up through London's warren of avenues and streets, off the Thames. Fischer stood half-facing Montague, the museum and its black iron fence in his peripherals. He was unsure whether things unwatched would disappear. He was about to re-ring the bell when a man answered the door.

He was young, black-haired, pale, thinner, even, than Fischer, and longer through the legs. He wore black jeans, black battered lace-up boots, a ratty brown hoody. White cracked stenciling across the chest: _GOTHAM ALIEN ARTS_. He looked at Fischer with oddly pale hazel eyes.

Fischer asked: "Is she here, Nick?"

They were beyond surprise, both of them, if not quite all the way to expectancy, let alone familiarity. The young man who'd been one third of the team that had inducted Fischer into dream-defense training fourteen months ago nodded and stood aside to let Fischer enter. The dusk seemed to follow him in. The entry hall was painted a pale, faded rose; to Fischer's immediate left, a doorway opened onto steps leading downward into darkness; beyond the doorway was a glass-windowed cage of a room, like a small office. Straight ahead, at the entryway's terminus, a nearly ladder-thin run of stairs covered in maroon carpeting wound its way upward. To his right stood an oaken sideboard overhung by a gilt-framed wall mirror; twelve feet further along, a golden wedge of light angled out through a heavily woodworked doublewide doorway. As Fischer entered, the floorboards creaked dryly beneath a thin green runner and the gritty wet soles of his shoes.

"Take your coat?" Nick asked, his voice in its New York accent pragmatic yet polite. Fischer was shrugging clear of water-heavy sleeves when a woman's voice said, "Who is it, Nick?", and Susan Gaumont stepped into the entry hall from the doorway to the right.

Fischer handed Nick his overcoat as his eyes met hers. He felt no anger, no shock, no longer the numbness he'd been feeling for months; he felt, looking at her in that dim hallway, more brightly, brilliantly alive than he'd felt in ages. He tried a smile with facial muscles unaccustomed to anything but stillness.

"Hello, Susan," he said.

She was nearly his height in weathered leather boots, worn jeans, a faded loose charcoal-colored sweater, the sleeves too long. A man's sweater. Not originally hers, Fischer thought. He wondered who'd given it to her, or from whose closet she'd taken it on permanent loan. He remembered her hair as being black. In the dusky light of the hallway, it was a very deep brown; she wore it as she had in Sydney, in his memory and in the dreams she and her team had concocted for his mental-security training and in his dreams since then, long and straight, loose against her shoulders. Its darkness contrasted with the London-winter pallor of her skin.

With eyes he remembered clearly from their minutes together in the real world (minutes only: no more than three-quarters of an hour total, of that he was flatly certain)— a blue between slate and serge, wideset and intelligent in the strong features of her face (lips full but not quite lush, cheekbones cleanplaned and high, a nose not shy but straight and not unsubtle)— she was looking at him— how?— incredulously, sadly, disbelievingly. Possibly with profound relief. With a trace of happiness, too. Too many emotions, too carefully controlled.

"Mr. Fischer," she replied.

A tympanic pounding of his heart as she spoke his name. Not a racing. More like notes on a musical staff, three distinct blows, say: _boom BOOM boom_. He remembered her voice thus, too: upper alto in its timbre. Refined, intoxicating. Truly: a sweet alcoholic smokiness to it, like good single-malt whiskey.

He didn't quite meet her eyes. He said— another memory— as he had over a year ago, in an art gallery in Sydney: "It's Robert. Rob, if you prefer."

He heard his own voice as though he were listening to a sound recording. A digital file baritone in pitch, flat, soft. Mechanical.

She came closer. Something in the region of her sternum caught the light, a faceted glint, as she approached: a small rough chunk of amethyst, wire-wrapped, hanging from a silver chain around her neck. "What are you doing here, Robert?"

He hesitated. He'd been so careful to remember the details of the trip here; now he found himself fighting an urge to look behind himself, to see if the door (now shut: he'd heard the click of the lock, felt the drop in air-motion at his back, as Nick closed it), the steps, rain-slick Montague, the square crouching bulk of the museum, the world itself, were still there.

"That's not part of—" he whispered. Not part of his memory.

Not part of the dream.

She was close enough to touch him. She didn't. She tilted her face up toward his, angling, he realized, for a better look at his eyes. Looking down at her hands, so close to his, Fischer could see that the too-long sleeves of her sweater were slightly frayed at the cuffs.

"Susan—" Nick said, caution in his tone. Fischer stood very still while Susan examined him. Just beyond his peripherals, he knew, the other man was tensing, easing toward a stance either offensive or protective.

"It's alright, Nick," she replied. Why that was so Fischer could only guess: either he was that small, that pathetic, that bedraggled and broken-looking, or she could see in his eyes whatever it was she had hoped to see. That his pupils weren't dilated, perhaps. That his sclerae weren't shot through with red. That he wasn't high on drugs. Now she straightened away, touched his right arm. "Why are you here, Robert?"

He looked at her. He was acutely aware, suddenly, that he hadn't shaved. Hadn't shaved in— How many days? He frowned. He could see himself in the hallway mirror. He wore a white dress shirt. No tie. His suit jacket, deep-ocean blue, pinstriped, he could recall taking from a heavy hotel hanger Wednesday. (In his mind, he could hear, clearly, the clacking of the brass hook on the closet cross-rod.) Today, he was almost certain, was Sunday. His hair was lank, lighter in memory and in reality in its brown than Susan's, though nearly black, now, for being rain-wet and pushed back off his pale wide forehead. Coarse stubble filled like reddish-brown moss the hollows beneath his high cheekbones. He tried not to stare at her. His wideset eyes at the best of times were practically unearthly, cold and pale; now, he sensed, their glassy blue bordered on the maniacal.

"This isn't part of the dream," he heard himself say.

"What dream?" she asked, gently.

He replied, truthfully: "I'm not sure." He wasn't sure if he'd ever known. Suddenly, too, he couldn't remember the last three streets he'd crossed, coming here. One might have been, _must_ have been, Holborn; the others were nameless, blank. He bit his lower lip; he swallowed half a sob. "Can we— I need to talk to you, Susan."

"Of course. Come in." She took his arm, led him away from the door.

Nick was hanging Fischer's coat in a closet off the cage room; he kept his eyes on Fischer as he re-crossed the entryway ahead of them. "I'll be in the workroom, Sue, if you need me."

That's what lay through the room to the right. Fischer might have thought it a parlor; he'd had inklings, imaginings. of old furniture, a sofa and heavy stuffed chairs, maybe bookshelves and a television. What he saw, passing, did, indeed, include a sofa and chairs. It also included a floor-city of tower CPUs and a sturdy table on which lay keyboards and a bank of monitors, their screens either alive with what looked to be AUTO-CAD programming or dancing with starburst screensavers.

"We'll be more comfortable upstairs," Susan said. She was still holding on to his arm. "You're cold. Would you like something hot to drink? Tea?"

"No, thank you."

She released him at the foot of the stairs, which were too narrow to allow for anything other than single-file traffic. He followed her up.

#####

At the top of the stairs, a narrow hallway, its walls a pale yellow, led right and left. Frosted wall sconces provided light; a pattern of flowers had faded as if into mist in the green carpeting. Fischer followed Susan to the left. At the end of the hall was a library, little more than a cubby, really. Bookshelves occupied every available inch of wall from floor to high ceiling, crowding even against the room's tall window. The smell of leather, dust, heavy velum paper. Two high-backed leather-upholstered chairs, hints of burgundy in their sheen, faced one another near the window. A tall brass reading lamp flanked each one; Susan closed the window's heavy red curtains, then reached beneath the lily-shaped lampshades and switched on the bulbs. She motioned Fischer to one of the resulting pools of light, took the other for herself.

Fischer said, rhetorically, as they sat: "You must have seen the news."

"Your father, yes: I'm so very sorry."

Fischer swallowed around a tightness in his throat. His father had been dead, now, for just under a year. Maurice Fischer had never treated his son with anything other than variations on distance following the death of Robert's mother; nevertheless, grief, uncaring, unmindful of its source, still could have its way. "Thank you. But, no, not that—"

"About Fischer-Morrow in the Court of International Trade? Yes, I saw."

"What did the reports say?" His voice was flat. "Tell me."

"That it was a standard-issue anti-trust investigation, if one on an epic scale. A going concern of that size: several of your competitors were voicing monopoly allegations—"

"Susan, it was me. I tried to break up the company."

She frowned, shocked. "What—?"

Fischer continued, softly: "I don't know what's real anymore. If my thoughts are my own. To make a long story short, five weeks to the day following my father's death, I walked into a cabinet meeting and declared my intention to liquidate Fischer-Morrow. Uncle Peter— Peter Browning: I don't think you met him— my godfather, our head of accounting— thank God, he fought me on it. When it became clear that I wasn't voicing a misguided whim, on behalf of the board of directors, he and our head of legal affairs suggested— _suggested_— that I take a sabbatical. Our publicity department, meanwhile, was prepared to issue a statement to the effect that I'd suffered a breakdown following the death of my father. Sheer luck: it never came to that. Our share value worldwide would have fallen through the floor."

He leaned forward, rested his elbows on his knees, rested his chin on peaked fingertips.

"So now we're in court. The board versus me, me versus myself. Browning isn't trying to shut me out— he's a hard bastard, but he's nothing if not loyal. I still have access to the company files, to my holdings and funds—"

Now she leaned forward, too. "Why don't you just drop the suit?"

"It's not as simple as that. For one thing, it opened the door for the anti-monopolists. The C.I.T. has ordered an examination of our articles of incorporation, which could lead, at the very least, to a reorganization of our governing structures. For another, the directors now have doubts of their own regarding my competence, my sanity. And, finally, I do, too. I'm doubting myself. It's like an obsession: I _want_ to break the company up. But, Susan, I don't. It's my heritage. It's powerful; it's successful. I'm proud of it. The thing is, at the back of it all— at the back of my mind— I've got this thought— this belief, almost— that my father wanted me to be my own man."

"He very likely did, Robert."

"But it's as if the idea was— is— I don't know— Not organic. I don't know how else to describe it. Like it's masquerading as my own, and I don't— I don't know where it came from."

Her face went very still. "Like someone put it there?"

"It sounds insane." Much to his shame, his eyes filled with tears. He continued, his tone harsh, to hide his embarrassment, anger, fear:

"You see, part of being your own person is accepting who you are. Accepting your duties. I knew who I was. Or I thought I did. The idea that I should be my own man: I should have been able to reconcile that with running the company. All that fucking power: of course I could be my own man. I could do whatever I wanted. But it was a compulsion. Insidious. To be my own man, I had to _break up the business_. I had to destroy it from the inside out. And along with it came this— I think it was meant to be a realization, but somehow I knew it wasn't: that Dad loved me, that he wasn't disappointed in me, that he didn't think I was weak. Susan, I'm not stupid. I'm not that naive. My therapist had been telling me those things about Dad for years: one bloody plane trip wasn't going to suddenly validate all of it."

She accepted without question his obviously rocky relationship with his father. She focused her question elsewhere: "What plane trip was that?"

"The flight from Sydney to Los Angeles. Dad died, and I was taking him— He wanted to be buried in the States, next to Mom. Those ideas— being my own man, breaking up Fischer-Morrow— months later, I traced them back to that flight. They got into my dreams. I fell asleep, and that's when they got inside my head." His jaw was starting to shake. A tear broke loose, ran down into the forest of stubble on his right cheek; he pushed the trickle roughly away with the heel of his hand. "At first I thought— when I got to L.A.— You know how you feel sometime, after a long flight? Numb? Not just jet-lagged, but not quite yourself? I kept waiting for the feeling to pass, but it didn't. Days later, after the funeral, and it was like I was still waiting for myself to arrive. And those thoughts that weren't mine, about breaking up the company, about being my own man—" He looked at her, met her eyes. "I've read up on it since."

"Read up on what, Robert?"

"I'm in the prodomal stage of schizophrenia."

"I doubt that." She left her chair, knelt on the carpet before him. She took his right arm, unbuttoned his cuff, pushed up the sleeves of his suit coat and shirt. She studied his forearm, turned his hand palm-up, traced the skin of his wrist with her fingertips. Examining him, Fischer realized, for needle marks. She asked, reaching for his his other hand: "Were you seated in first class?"

"Of course."

He didn't mean to sound arrogant, first class being simply a part of his life, how things were and how they'd always been; and then he felt his cheeks go warm as Susan, her eyes on the skin of his wrist, smiled slightly.

"Were you alone in the cabin?" she asked.

"No."

"Do you remember who was seated with you?"

"Not all of them, no. I was a bit lost in my own thoughts that day. But: a tall man, fair hair, broad face. Narrow eyes. Mid-thirties. I dropped my passport; he picked it up for me. Another man— we'd collided in the aisle. Also mid-thirties. Shorter than the first, I think. Dark hair, worn very short. Handsome, I suppose. There was— I think he had a scar across his right eyebrow. Something too smug about him. He said words to the effect of 'Pardon me,' and I thought—"

"What, Robert?"

He replied reluctantly. A bit sheepishly, after his error of haughtiness a moment before. "He had a British accent, and I thought it sounded a bit too coarse for first class."

It might have been a trick of the light, but he thought he saw recognition in her eyes.

"Do you know who I'm talking about?" Fischer asked.

"I might. Possibly. If it is who I think it is, his name is Eames."

She appeared to have found a spot of particular interest just south of the heel of his left hand; as a consequence, possibly, she seemed to hesitate before looking up. _Seemed_. No. He knew, then, as she raised her head and met his eyes, a chill creeping deeper than the cold and wet of the London December lurking beyond the curtains and the murky panes of the window next to his head:

She'd been in on it all along.

In the confines of the chair, Fischer straightened his jacket. He kept his eyes on hers; she was waiting, with apparent patience, for him to respond. He reached into the right-hand pocket of his jacket and took out a revolver, an old snub-nosed .38, cool and solid and heavy in his fingers, and pressed the muzzle of the barrel to the underside of Susan's chin.

At the touch of the metal on her skin, her breath hitched. "Robert—"

The angle of his arm beneath her jaw had already practically negated the space between them. Now he leaned close enough so that their foreheads were nearly touching.

"If I shoot you," he said, very softly, one more litany he'd been chanting, silently, in his head, on his lips, for days, "you'll only wake up. Am I right, Susan...?"

#####

#####


	2. Chapter 2

**A/N:** Thanks so much for the initial responses to this thing. As always, comments are more than appreciated! Twistiness lies ahead now, as does a fair dose of, well, _intimate_ content. (Though it be tender, I feel obligated to issue a warning: this is new territory for me.) As always, also, thanks for tagging along. Enjoy.

#####

#####

Susan said, calmly, the muzzle of the thirty-eight pressed to the soft underside of her chin: "No, Robert. If you shoot me, I'll be dead."

She was absolutely still save for what he perceived as the slightest elongation of her throat. A subconscious distancing of her jaw from the cold touch of the revolver.

"Are you certain of that?" he asked.

She didn't respond. She took a deep breath and eased away. He let her go, though he tracked her motion with the gun. She sat back on the edge of her own chair with the barrel of the thirty-eight now leveled at her forehead. "I'm former military, Robert. I was an officer in the RAF. You know that. If you're going to shoot me, I deserve to see it coming."

Fischer hesitated, his mind as much as his hand bound by shame, uncertainty, fear. He put the muzzle of the thirty-eight to his own right temple. A familiar touch, that. Cool, as hard and light, in its way, as ice. "And if I shoot myself?"

"You'll die, too. You won't wake up. I promise you that."

No threat in her tone. No anger, no fear. Her expression was neutral, her eyes sad and gentle.

Fischer lowered the gun. "I'm afraid to fall asleep," he said. He felt the weight of the revolver like a palpable chunk of death in his hand. He felt himself start to cry, the feeling as well as the crying itself methodical, almost mechanical. He hunched forward in his chair, folding into himself, shaking. "I've been— I'm afraid to dream."

Susan stood. She reached toward, if not for, the gun, her motion less cautious than simply fluid and slow. Fischer handed it to her. He asked, as he watched her remove and pocket the cylinder:

"Are you going to call the police now?"

She stepped from between their chairs, went to set the revolver, a precise, distinct _click_ of metal against heavy wood, on the room's reading table. "Do you think I should?"

He didn't reply. A long silence in the light-pocketed darkness. Susan came back to the window, but she didn't re-seat herself. She stood by Fischer's chair; with the fingertips of her right hand, she brushed his still-damp hair away from his forehead.

Fischer didn't look up at her. His voice was library-low, practically a murmur: "So stupid. It's so stupid. The one thing that's seemed absolutely real to me since— since—"

"Since Sydney?"

"Yes." He spoke half to her midriff, half to the wing of his chair. "Do you remember— At the gallery: do you remember?" At the Sydney Museum of Contemporary Art, Fischer having ingested a bit too much liquid courage at the prospect, both before and after, of providing the opening address for the museum's new Berryman Wing, they'd spent possibly a third of their three-quarters of an hour together in the real world. "I was drunk; I was being a complete ass—"

"I kissed you. You responded in kind."

"That— that was real for me. Was it—"

"— real for me, too?"

"Like I said—" Fischer looked away, cleared his throat. "Stupid."

Susan said nothing. In reply, instead, she took his face in her hands, leaned down, and kissed his lips. Tentatively at first, yet firmly. She angled closer to him, and Fischer groaned softly, drawing her closer still, his hands on her lower back, her hips, and kissed her deeply back.

She embraced him while he was still seated, held him in a close mutual nuzzling to her belly and breasts. She drew him to his feet, then; they re-kissed, re-embraced, their hands reaching mutually for, and fondling, buttocks. He pressed himself against her. She rubbed herself in turn against him, opened herself to the hardness rising at his groin. Fischer's breathing grew rough. His heart seemed to be pounding right at the base of his throat. Susan caressed his cheek, smiled for him as she took his hand. "Come on."

#####

Her bedroom was next to the library. Just one door down. Desk, chair, dozing laptop. Books, hardback, paperback, on shelves, in low stacks on the floor. A wall-mounted washbasin and mirror in the far corner, perpendicular to the high window. Photographs, framed, on the walls, some sepia-old, some black and white, some in vibrant color. People, landscapes, animals. Smiles from two women who might have been Susan younger and older: her sister, possibly, their mother. And, in short order, Fischer's suit jacket and shirt and her sweater, off. A trembling radiated from his heart out to his hands as he undressed her. Her amethyst necklace she kept on. Her unhooked bra freed firm and modest, yet shapely, breasts. He caressed them, tentatively at first, a cupping of his palms against her soft warm flesh, a gentle squeezing, as she knelt on the low wide bed and unbuttoned and unzipped his trousers and fondled him through his boxer-briefs, as Fischer, breathless, sucked her tongue. The first time, really, that he'd kissed a woman so desperately, so deeply. The girls of the elite service that had been available to him in Sydney had neither openly encouraged, nor had they seemed to expect, such attentions. The effect, for him, now, was both weakening and electrifying. He was shaking as he laid Susan back on the bed's blue comforter, pulled away her boots and socks, her jeans and panties. He finished undressing himself and stood for a moment clearly in her view. She seemed to like what she saw. She smiled, her eyes possessive and bright, eager with lust. Then she drew him down to her and spread wide her slender thighs, and he mounted her.

#####

It was clumsy, a bit too quick, maybe, but absolutely and profoundly satisfying. She came as he came, inside her, moaning and groaning, both of them, respectively, as spasms shook their loins; wrapped in her arms and legs, he lay against her, gasping, his penis still buried deep inside her.

Still beneath him, she reached for a tissue from a box on the bedside table; she caught the trickle of his semen as he pulled out. Then she again drew him close and wrapped him in her arms, and Fischer lay with his softening cock resting in the crease of her hip and was held.

#####

The rain turned to sleet. It pelted and hissed at the windowpanes. Fischer, from a cozy distance, as it were, examined the contrasts: the lingering cold, the blue-black darkness, the embodiment of unreality, outside; the comfort and warmth here, with her. A nestling of blankets and sheets, the comforter drawn back, once their initial passion cooled.

She kissed him, having yet to speak; Fischer kissed her back. Her taste and scent, the glorious fact of her total nudity, brought him nearly instantaneously again to arousal. She smiled for him, nuzzled his throat, and took his shaft in hand (he was modest lengthwise, but satisfyingly thick, or so the girls of the service had, in unflinching honesty, been bluntly kind enough to let him know), and Fischer eased back onto her and slid once more into her slick warm depths.

#####

This time, they took their time.

"I missed this," Susan said, a little dreamily, as Fischer, supporting himself easily on straight arms, his thighs and hers widespread, slowly pumped her.

"Been a while...?"

"Yeah." She ran her hands down his back, squeezed his buttocks. "I love the feeling, being filled like this."

Fischer smiled. "Do I fill you...?"

Susan nodded. "You're exactly right. You feel so real, Robert."

She drew him down, kissed him tenderly; Fischer's eyes filled with tears. He ducked his head to nuzzle her throat so that she wouldn't see him crying.

#####

She climaxed once, whimpering; he coaxed her to another orgasm, took her right to the brink, then left her lingering just long enough to make her final release absolutely apocalyptic. She muffled a scream against his shoulder, raked his skin with her teeth. Her fingers clenched his buttocks. He could have come right then, but he wanted to enjoy her climax; he waited. She was able, then, to watch him, to see him, when ejaculation finally overcame him: he groaned, pushed tightly against her: his seed spilled into her in long, hot, uncontrollable spasms.

#####

This time, he caught the outflow himself, the pearly excess, with a tissue from the box on the nightstand. His eyes now fully adjusted to the sparse light passing through the sleet-spattered window, he lingered for a moment, looking down openly at her, at her breasts and belly, at her pussy, too, her dark mound and her vagina glistening with their mingled juices, and suddenly he realized—

"Oh, my God. I didn't use a condom."

She looked at the shock on his face and laughed. "It's okay, darling. We're okay; I've got it covered."

She drew him down for a kiss. Then Fischer, feeling adventurous, a little devilish, curious as well (this being yet another behavior the girls of his escort service hadn't seemed to expect or, for that matter, encourage), began to kiss his way down her torso. Susan relaxed beneath his touch; when he tongued her navel, she tangled her fingers gently in his hair, met his eyes when he looked up.

"Have you ever gone down on a woman before?" she asked, softly.

"No."

She caressed his cheek. "Pretend you're eating an ice cream."

Her tone went straight to his cock. His breath caught as he hardened again. She seemed to read it as hesitation; her expression, though, was playful yet knowing. "You _have_ eaten ice cream before, haven't you?"

He tried, through a sheepish smile, to sound casual. "Once or twice."

He eased farther toward the foot of the bed, angling for easier access to her; Susan spread her legs for him. Fischer hooked his arms under her thighs and ran his tongue slowly over her clitoris.

The scent, the tastes— hers, his, too— musky, tangy, tart and sweet— shot through him like electricity. His penis went fully, unabashedly erect. He buried his face in Susan's pussy and began to lick her in earnest, and she pushed herself eagerly against his mouth, moaning in surprise and delight.

#####

He lost track of her orgasms. Eventually, he was very much in need of his own. He slid up, kneeling, pulled her legs against his chest, pushed his cock into her willing wet depths, and ejaculated no more than three thrusts later, arching uncontrollably back, buried in her to his aching, spasming testes. Light burst behind his eyes; he heard a cry and couldn't tell if the sound came from her or from him. It was as if he were completely inside her and she were inside him, too, one inside the other, all one.

#####

He relaxed his grip on her legs, and Susan wrapped her thighs around his waist. She lay watching him, panting; she looked as stunned as Fischer felt. He had yet to soften. In his post-orgasmic weakness, he was almost afraid to move. He could feel his trembling pass from his torso and loins through his erection, the eager jut of his flesh still buried deep inside her.

She shifted slightly, the muscles of her vagina squeezing his cock, and Fischer realized, disbelievingly, almost deliriously, that he was, if anything, getting harder.

"Here," Susan said. "My turn."

She rolled him onto his back, straddled his loins, and lowered herself back onto his seemingly indefatigable erection. She set a slow, deep pace, and Fischer treated himself to the sight of his glistening shaft sliding in and out of her. Susan smiled down at him.

"Hey," she said, "there's more to life than that."

She took his hands, placed them on her breasts, and Fischer, in wonderment, squeezed and caressed. Her breath caught as he circled her erect nipples with the balls of his thumbs; she closed her eyes, her head going back, and undulated against him.

#####

Orgasm, ejaculation. Moans, cries. Another slow trickling of semen from her vagina, this time back down the shaft of his penis into his own dark pubic hair.

#####

He drew her close, wrapped her in his arms, while she was still astride him, her hair feathering his face and shoulders like a silk-soft curtain as they kissed, breathing in together, out together, her belly pressed to his, her breasts radiating warmth against his chest.

Question and fact, then: "Shower," she said, drawing away, dismounting. She sat beside him, tousled, animal-casual, her expression tender but wryly critical. "Sleeping isn't the only thing you haven't been doing for the past few days, is it?" She swung her coltish long legs off the bed, stood. For a moment, the implication, like his body odor itself, deftly eluded Fischer's hormone-intoxicated brain. Reluctant to leave the comfort of the sheets, his muscles heavy with the sweet exhaustion of sex, he lay simply looking up at her.

"You're perfect," he murmured in reply.

"Not quite." She smiled down at him, held out her hand. "Come on, lazybones."

#####

Once he was on his feet, his mind refocused. Physical details equaled reality: the chilly air on his chest and back, the sand-like roughness of the worn carpet beneath the heels and balls of his feet. He saw no door that might lead to a bathroom; he looked at Susan with an inquiring frown—

"Sorry," she said. "This was a B&B before we acquired it. Afraid we're not entirely _en suite_."

She opened the door leading to the hall. Fischer hesitated, looking out—

Susan chuckled. "Do you want a robe? Chris is on assignment, and Nick is downstairs."

Of course he should be prepared to walk nude down a hallway in a strange building.

"I, umm—"

Susan sighed, took his jaw in her hands, leaned up the inch or so it took to bring her face level with his, and kissed him slowly.

"Oh, that helps," Fischer panted, when his mouth was once more solely his.

Susan looked down at the source of his complaint, smiled mischievously. "Are you always on such a hair trigger?"

"Only one way to find out." He brushed the hair away from the left side of her neck, indulged in a slow, thorough nibbling of the exposed skin. "Intensive research."

She breathed out, slowly, pleasurably, angling her throat to facilitate his ministrations. "Through which we create a solid body of empirical data—?"

"Mm hm."

"In the shower, Mr. Fischer."

#####

The bathroom was the size of the closet, midway along the hall, from which Susan took rough white washcloths and motley purple towels; the shower was no more than the size of the refrigerator in Fischer's flat back home. Elbows and knees, angling. Soft laughter on both their parts as Fischer surrendered again to the urge in his loins.

"Pardon me, Miss Gaumont," he murmured, looking into her eyes at the moment of sliding-slick-slow penetration. "There doesn't seem to be anywhere else to put the damned thing.'

"Quite all right, Mr. Fischer," she replied, as Fischer lifted her right thigh to half-embrace his hip. She relaxed with a soft gasp into his first thrust. "Quite, quite all right."

#####

In the warm spray, post-coitus, they held one another, washed one another, kissed tenderly, caressed. Fischer embraced her from behind, and Susan, squeezing his forearms to her midriff, let him drift to a near-doze with his face nestled against her neck. On their way back to her room, she stopped again at the closet, pulled fresh folded sheets from a high shelf. Dried, in clean linens and in each other's arms, they slept.

#####

#####

His heart beat slowly and steadily through her palm; Susan Gaumont lay quietly with her right hand resting on his chest and listened to Robert Fischer's breathing. He was beside her under the sheet and soft worn blanket of her bed, flat on his back, deeply asleep. He wasn't snoring; he wasn't laboring. No roughness to his respiration. She raised herself up far enough to see his angelically handsome, if wildly unshaven, face: smooth, synchronous motion beneath the eyelids, the barest, breeze-like fluttering of beautifully long light-brown lashes. She found herself smiling at those lashes; she found herself smiling, too, at the fact that he was experiencing a REM state free of distress. She leaned in close, kissed his forehead, his lips, and sat cautiously up. She turned the bedside lamp on for him, knowing how disorienting it could be to wake up in a strange room, especially when you weren't feeling quite yourself; she left a note, too, simple and direct (_Be back soon. Ask Nick for something to eat; get more sleep. Love, S_); she dressed, took the revolver from the table in the library, and went downstairs. Nick was sprawled on a stuffed chair in the work room with a TV show playing on one of the computer monitors. He had the sound turned up just a bit too high. Onscreen, a fresh-faced girl with dark hair and a true epicure's curves smiled as she slivered pork. Susan handed him the revolver and the cylinder.

Nick raised his eyebrows at the gun. "I was just about to come up and see if you needed help. Where are you off to?"

"If I told you, I might not be able to catch him there."

"I see." Nick examined the cylinder before tucking it away in the kangaroo pocket of his hoody. "I'll assume our guest is asleep. What do you want me to do if he wakes up?"

"Try to keep him here. Give him something to eat."

A casual wave of the thirty-eight. "But don't give him this, right?"

"He's not dangerous, Nick." She leaned down, planted a kiss on the crown of his head. "I'll be back soon."

#####

Subconsciously, Fischer had adopted a habit of those inured to dream-tech. Susan employed it now. With the sole difference being she wasn't distraught and exhausted and hence was sensible enough to take along a good umbrella, she chose to walk to her destination.

She might have walked but partway and trusted the remainder of the journey to one of the team's two cars, a bruised black Cooper S she and Nick and Chris kept parked in a garage off Holborn, had she not acquired a minder so shortly after leaving the house.

Her follower was a big looselimbed bastard in a black coat, shaggy-haired, tall but not broad, who broke away like a nightfall of glacial ice from a group of twenty-somethings huddled to the light of burning fag-ends beyond the ropes and bouncers at the door of a club two blocks from the museum. Susan wasn't afraid; she had, in fact, noticed him because, beyond the purpose of her trip, she was feeling relaxed. Nerves closed rather than heightened her senses; right now, she was comfortably, intently aware of her surroundings.

From Bloomsbury to Soho, he never tried to close the distance between them. That's how she knew for certain he was minding her, following her, and not intent on robbery, rape, or other mischief. Not that she was afraid in any event: walking, she ran through a dozen scenarios in her head in which she neutralized him, crippled him, killed him, whether he was armed or not, and knew herself capable of enacting each one of those scenarios with or without the assistance of the seven-inch lockblade fighting knife clipped into the handle of her umbrella. But he kept between them a clean twenty meters of distance, even when she paused to look at the dresses in a shop window, then ducked into a doorway on the pretense of answering her phone. He began to hang back a bit farther beyond Greek Street; by the time Susan reached Wardour Street, he'd as much as vanished, lost to the rain and the spotty crowds and neon. And by then she was pretty much at her destination.

The Dreamtime, like its dozens of roachlike cousins, had existed, re-formed, reconfigured, as needed, in operation, before and since World War II. Bombing couldn't destroy such places; nor could burning. The clubs fought invisible turf wars, behind-doors so to say, tussling over passageways, storage space, cellars and sub-basements, a shifting maze of warrens that made for quick escapes and quicker concealments while confounding both the bounds of morality and those who would try to enforce London's zoning laws. In the Dreamtime's plate-glass front window, against blackout curtains since faded to the color of cheap merlot, neon tubing spelled out the promise of COCKTAILS and LIVE ENTERTAINMENT. Both claims, Susan knew, were at best only half true.

She walked past the club's two hawkers, two seedy boys like smack-addled bookends, shoulders hunched against the rain, their hands jammed in the pockets of identical tawdry leather coats, before they could try on her either muttered catcalls or a standard pitch regarding cheap cover, cheaper drinks, no minimum, and passed between them through the club's open door into a half-lit passage carpeted, to the sides as well as underfoot, in gritty black. At the door leading into the club proper stood a troll of a man, six feet tall or better, an even mix of gristle and granite, steel-gray fuzz like metal shavings on his jowls and the crown of his head. He held out a cinderblock paw at the end of an arm, encased in the sleeve of a black leather jacket, as thick as a trans-Atlantic telecom cable; before he could name the club's going rate, Susan pressed a fifty-pound note into his hand. He raised his eyebrows, pocketed the bill, and let her pass.

Inside, she moved quickly through the outer realm of the damned, the cheap seats of Hell, the stink of must and watered booze and sweat, the circular tables at which huddled tourists looking trapped or shamed or both, the scattering of regulars, mostly middle-aged men nursing drinks in smudged glasses while they watched, slyly, shyly, openly, glassily, three girls swaying, not quite in time with the wooden thump of the club's low-end sound system, bony hips and flaccid exposed breasts on each of three tiny raised stages. To the right of the bar, she passed without pausing through a bar-handled door marked ABSOLUTELY NO ADMITTANCE.

Through the door, in the club's front storeroom, amid steel-frame shelves holding crates of liquor, bundles of paper napkins, boxes of crisps and peanuts, four men sat around a folding table playing cards. For a second after Susan entered they froze, a mug-shot moment of surprise immobile save for the drift of cigarette smoke. Then the one nearest the door, a fellow with cropped red hair and a featherweight's slight but dangerously wiry frame, rose and placed himself between Susan and what stood beyond the table and the shelving, that being another door at the far side of the room.

"Loo's outside to the left, love," he said.

He had eyes the color of dried bone marrow. Susan looked down at him— even in the low-heeled boots she was wearing, she had at least four centimeters on him— and said: "I want to see Eames."

Surprise negated a bit of the cockiness in his expression. "And who might you be?"

Susan replied, without a trace of irony: "His mother."

Snorts and laughter from the table. The wiry man smiled, displaying teeth thoroughly unexposed to the concept of flossing. "That's a new one, anyway. You'd've made his sixth sister this week." He chuckled. "Come on, Mum."

#####

Beyond the door at the other side of the room lay a deeper level of Hell. Susan expected as much: the farther one got from the street, from open air and the outside world, in a place such as this, the deeper grew one's appreciation for the first volume of the _Divine Comedy_. But what she saw now caught her nonetheless by surprise. Not a hive of bookmakers, not the packaging of drugs, not a maze of peepshows and glory holes.

No, this was a con new to the West End.

Maybe a dozen of them there were: boys and girls in their very late teens, early twenties. Each asleep on a sofa, a velvet settee, all of the furniture looking to have been nicked either from an antique shop or from the forgotten prop room of one of the area's many ancient theatres. Each tubed intravenously via limp and languid wrist to one of three PASIV machines. Pretty young things, rich, privileged, bored, in search of new thrills.

Susan shuddered in passing. _You'd be better off on Ecstasy,_ she thought.

#####

Yet another door at the far side of the dream-room, that much farther away from the street and, as such, the real world. Through it lay a casino, private and tiny. At a baccarat table, half facing the door, half facing the dealer, a wraithlike man in a ghost-white shirt and black button-down vest, sat a compact man in his early thirties. A handsome early thirties, Susan supposed, though she'd always seen more in terms of ancient decadence in his face. With his clean jawline and cropped dark hair, the look of a mad young Roman emperor, perhaps. A Cockney Nero, with those too-full lips. A Cheapside Caligula, with a cruel yet playful slant to his lapis-blue eyes.

"Eames—" said Susan's escort; he finished, once the man at the baccarat table had turned, fully, to face them, once his profligate-handsome face had not quite registered surprise at the sight of her: "— your mum's here to see you."

#####

#####


	3. Chapter 3

**A/N:** Just when you thought I'd abandoned this thing: it's Chapter 3! Explanations, a bit of intrigue, and a whole lot of a guy called Eames, too. Have at it... and, as ever and always, comments are more than welcome. Thanks for reading!

#####

#####

One of his powers, Susan imagined, was never to look surprised other than pleasantly, casually, or calculatedly; as he rose from his seat at the baccarat table, Eames opted for the first.

"Mother—!" His eyes twin sparks of mischief, he leaned in and planted a sloppy kiss on her cheek. "It's been ages."

As he leaned back out, Susan patted the inner pocket of her coat. Her wallet was still there. "You're slumming, Eames."

"So are you, darling. Even moreso if you're here to find me."

"We need to talk."

"Come on, then." He took a black leather jacket from the back of his chair.

"Are we done for tonight, Mr. Eames?" asked the cadaverous dealer.

"Would appear so, Henry."

Henry, with a dusty tact seemingly better suited to a funeral parlor than a gambling den, continued as he plucked cards from the baize: "Will you be cashing out, sir?"

Eames might have shared Susan's thought at the question: _We all cash out eventually, don't we?_ He said with a half-smile, making a quick tally of the chips short-stacked on the table: "Tell you what, Henry: it's nearly Christmas. Buy yourself a Ferrari."

"Thank you, sir," Henry said, his lips pulling briefly back into a skull's smile as he gathered up the chips. He turned his attentions, his eyes seeming to track without moving, like a waxwork's, to the rust-topped bantam who had escorted Susan to the casino. "Care to try your luck, Mr. Bob?"

Bob shook his head. "That's a fool's game, innit?"

He turned and went out the way he and Susan had come.

"Which, obliquely, I suppose, makes me the fool in residence," Eames said. "Allow this fool to buy you a drink, Susan."

He made a move to replicate Bob's exit. Susan caught his arm.

"Not here," she said.

"It's not like the old days, Sue. There's at least a one in three chance you won't be drugged and sold into white slavery."

She didn't smile at the joke. She'd been too long in the Dreamtime already; though she wasn't prone to claustrophobia, she was beginning to feel compressed, both mentally and physically. As though she were midway through the digestive tract of some monstrous worm. She needed to breathe outside air.

"And those kids in the room before this one, Eames? What sort of slavery have you sold them into?"

"Not my trade, love. New vices make for new demands. The owners have to keep pace with the times, you know."

He slung his jacket over his shoulder and led the way out, his direction a twisting opposite of Bob's, through the casino, a maze of tables, games in private rooms hazed with tobacco smoke, a handful of pocket-sized wet bars. A series of rooms, their doorframes strung with blue glass beads, in which young men and women lounged on cushions or danced, black-lit, bass-heavy electronica from a sound system of far better quality than that in the Dreamtime's strip-club flowing around them more like waves of water than of sound. A sweet heady musk of incense, marijuana, and sweat.

And then they were out. Like that. As if he'd teleported them through a wall. One, Susan was certain, of a dozen exits unknown to the public- and to the police.

"Well, where to?" Eames asked. The sleet had turned to snow, which was dropping in heavy wet clumps, not flakes; he wrinkled his nose skyward, shrugging into his jacket.

It was meant to be a rhetorical question, if not an outright mocking one. Having been led hither and yon through the club, she would be well within her rights to be disoriented now. Susan looked left, saw nothing but wet black cobbles, an alley's brick walls, darkness. To the narrow right she caught a glimpse of lights. The holiday displays on Oxford Street. A seasonal promise of fellowship and salvation, capitalistic, spiritual, no more than a hundred meters from the Dreamtime's tawdry pantheon of the damned.

"This way," she said. Turning before he could see her noticing his look of wry admiration, she walked away from the lights, into the darkness. Eames followed.

#####

#####

He felt, waking, as though he were pulling his way up through warm sand. A weight, a weighing, throughout his being, though one comfortable and free of panic. No sense of suffocation, of being buried alive, of losing himself to a rising tide of _other_.

Fischer sighed out a lungful of sleep and opened his eyes.

He was on his back, nude but covered by the flat sheet and soft buff blanket of Susan's bed. The lamp on the bedside table was casting a ring of low-wattage light that effectively reached only to Fischer's chest and belly; his pillowed head lay in dusk, in the periphery. Susan's pillow, basking in the brunt of the glow, was empty. Susan herself was gone.

Fischer sat up, muzzily frowning, and looked about. He saw propped against the green-glazed base of the bedside lamp a piece of paper, folded; _Robert _was written in cursive black ink on the out-facing side. He reached, unfolded, read:

_Be back soon. Ask Nick for something to eat; get more sleep. Love, S_

Had he been wondering what had woken him (not a strange sound from a strange house; not, as he was accustomed to sleeping alone, Susan's absence; not a nightmare, his dreaming— for now just that, detail-free but unalarming— having scattered into his mind's peripherals when he opened his eyes), the note provided a clue. Or cued a clue: from Fischer's belly came an audible rumbling.

Yet another thing he'd neglected in the past few days: he couldn't remember the last time he'd eaten.

Well, the invitation was there in the note, practical and plain, sweetened, even, with _love_. Fischer swung his legs off the bed, stood. He crossed to Susan's side, remembering with a tingle above (or below) the thundering in his gut how she'd tugged away his trousers and briefs, how he'd finally pulled them all the way down and stepped clear, leaving them on the floor beside the bed.

The carpet next to the bed was empty. His pants weren't there. Nor were his shoes. Not even a sock, as he ducked for a look under the bedframe.

He straightened, puzzled, mildly disturbed, and looked toward the computer-desk chair: he half-recalled his shirt landing there, inside-out, after he and she co-fumbled with the buttons and pushed and pulled it free of his torso and shoulders. Nothing. No shirt. No suit jacket, either.

He checked the closet, found only Susan's clothes. Three dresses (one of which, peacock-blue and modest, he remembered, with yet another quiet yet distinct thrill, from Sydney, a year ago), jeans, shirts, sweaters, all hung neatly on heavy wooden hangers. Earlier, she'd mentioned a robe: it must have been housed elsewhere.

Puzzled, Fischer made a last sweep of the room, found none of his things. Then he pulled the flat sheet from the bed, wrapped it around his waist and up over his shoulders, and went downstairs.

#####

"Jacob Marley, as I live and breathe," Nick said from his half-sprawl in an old upholstered chair, when Fischer appeared, ghostlike, in the doublewide doorway of the workroom. "That's not right, is it? Fuck Dickens. You hungry?"

"Where are my clothes?"

Nick sat up. He had in his lap a wireless keyboard; he placed the keyboard before one of the monitors on the room's tech-cluttered table, cocked his head past Fischer toward the stairs leading to the basement, and listened. "Umm... spin cycle, sounds like. Pet peeve. I hate putting on jizzed underwear, don't you? Anyway: you want some quiche?"

"Pardon— what?"

"Quiche. Chris made it. His turn to cook. Look, I brushed your suit, washed the rest. Just so you know. Susan said I should offer you something to—"

"Where is she?"

"Off making life miserable for—" He paused, frowning thoughtfully. "—Eames, I'm thinking. She had that 'migraine on the horizon' look when she left. Back to the quiche: are you hungry?"

He wasn't being impatient. Or not exactly. He seemed on the point of speaking very slowly and clearly for Fischer's benefit; his tone and cadence suggested that New Yorkers didn't have time to waste, even when they were five hours ahead of their home turf.

Fischer persisted: "Who is he? Susan mentioned him before— umm, before we— Who's Eames?"

"Nope: I asked first. Hungry?"

"Yeah, I am," Fischer replied, honestly.

Nick stood. "Come on. Kitchen's downstairs."

Lingering in the doorway, Fischer gestured to his toga-like wrappings. "Like this?"

Nick drifted closer. He fingered the sheet in the region of Fischer's left hip, said slyly: "Take it off, if you like."

"I, uhh—"

"Sex is one of the classic 'grounding' activities for people in our realm of experience. As, I'm sure, Susie thoroughly demonstrated before she stepped out."

Fischer's ears went warm. "And the quiche is—?"

Nick smiled, eased past him. "Right this way."

#####

He settled Fischer at a table in what had been the patron dining room when the house had been a bed and breakfast, and what was now half dining area, half exercise room-slant-entertainment area. A widescreen television, wall-mounted, a green sofa, a wide rack of iron dumbbells, thin foam mats in black and blue on the floor. A ballasted blue kickboxing bag standing in the corner. Seated on the black vinyl cushion of a heavy metal-frame chair, Fischer watched Nick through the open doorway leading to the kitchen.

Nick talked as he moved between cupboards, cutlery drawers, a stainless steel refrigerator, and an above-range microwave, dishing up a hearty helping of quiche from an outsized pie tin. "What we're doing for you, here, tonight: it's all about helping you to achieve a manageable level of paranoia. Sex, as I said, is a classic grounder. A grounding activity," he re-phrased, in response to Fischer's querying look. "Not that— Don't think for a second that Sue would have fucked you if her heart wasn't in it one hundred percent. She's not that kind of girl. Also: screwing tends to make you hungry. It does if you're doing it right, anyway. Which leads to classic grounder number two—" He opened the microwave, pulling the cuffs of his sleeves over his fingertips to protect them from the heat of the plate, and carried said plate, along with a utilitarian plain knife and fork, to the table. "— eating. Food. Dig in."

Fischer ate. Nick brought him a glass of water and a white paper napkin, then left Fischer to his food while he passed out of sight, to the left of the kitchen, into the laundry room. He emerged again to the sound of the tumble-and-bump of dryer balls, made coffee. He seated himself opposite Fischer with one of two chipped brown mugs, the other now at Fischer's right elbow, and looked at him openly. "Those aren't contacts, are they? Your eyes are a remarkable shade of blue."

A pause with fork midway between plate and mouth. "Umm... thank you." The tines and their savory burden reached harbor. A chewing, a swallowing, to go with the blush now on his face. Fischer was suddenly thankful for his overgrowth of whiskers. "No, I'm not— I'm not bi. Sorry."

"On the contrary: thank you for being honest without getting hostile."

Fischer frowned, troubled. "What she— what Susan did: was it really just a form of therapy?"

"Without having witnessed the specifics, let me say this: I've known Susan Gaumont for three years realtime, and I've never known her just to go through the motions. In any context. She is almost— how do I put it?— dangerously sincere." Nick pulled back his sleeve, checked his watch. "Look," he said, glancing back at Fischer, "I've got something running upstairs. There's plenty more stuff in the fridge. Help yourself."

He took his cup of coffee, left Fischer to his food. Fischer finished his first piece of quiche and, still hungry, warmed and ate a second. He placed his empty dishes in the kitchen sink, switched off the light, went back upstairs.

Nick was back in the workroom, leaned forward, now, in his sloppy palace of a chair, his eyes intent on one of the monitors. A parade of images, film clips, on the screen. Faces, male and female, young and old, a house, weathered, seaside. A first-person perspective of images moving across a porch, through a screen door, a storm door. Light from across the way filling a wood-beamed dining room, the sea as seen through wide windows. The ambient color, entering, was blue within white light; Nick tapped his keyboard, reached for a mouse: the light inside dimmed, shifted bronzeward.

His belly full, his being as a whole arguably still very tired, Fischer found himself nearly hypnotized. "You design dreams?" he asked.

"Dream environments," Nick replied. "Most teams employ an architect, or someone with architectural training. No reason why an artist, someone with graphics-design experience, couldn't do just as well. That's me," he added, offering Fischer a cocky smirk before turning back to the screen. "Maybe some designers can work free-form; I like to try stuff out on the box. Experiment with the emotive content of color, lighting, how the eye tracks within a three-dimensional frame. There's an importance to keeping things ordinary for the subject. But, also, we create focal elements. Points of interest. Things that draw the eye, the subject's attention." Another rat-tat-tat of mouse-clicks, and the sea-house became one of half a dozen windows on the screen. Animated scenes like a living solitaire spread. Nick leaned back in his chair, looked up at Fischer. "Shiny things, for example. Mirrors, for instance: most of us are automatically drawn to our own reflections. It's nearly a compulsion. You did it when you came in tonight. Fucked up as you were, you had to check yourself out." He grinned. "Also, for instance, the use of darkness: not only does it excuse a certain lack of environmental detail, it helps to direct the dreamer's gaze."

"Like chiaroscuro," Fischer said. "Using shadow to define space."

"Very good."

"How many designers— how many teams are there?"

"Worldwide? I have no idea. There's a number of groups in London: we seem to be drawn to memory pockets. Older cities. History seems to be a form of grounding, too." He asked, directly: "Do you remember your dreams?"

"Not normally."

"Define 'abnormally.'"

"The dreams that were designed for me." Fischer frowned, considering, realizing. "Those, I think, are the ones I remember most clearly."

"Which is why you're here, right? Somebody got inside your head, messed with your dreams, fucked you up?"

"I think so, yes."

"You think it was us?"

Nick was looking at him very directly. Fischer looked just as directly back at him.

"Susan isn't the only violently sincere one, is she?"

"No: she's sincere. I'm blunt." Nick relaxed his stare. "You've been inside dreams that I designed for you. Are those the ones that screwed you up?"

"No."

"Or else you would have been sticking that thirty-eight in _my_ face, am I right?"

Fischer said, mortified: "She told you."

"She gave me the fucking gun. And, before you ask: no, you can't have it back." Nick's expression, like his tone, was reassuring, though, not aggressive or accusing. He got up, came over, placed a hand on Fischer's shoulder. "Look, man, not to be a bitch, but you look like you're dead on your feet. Why don't you go back to bed?"

Nothing sexual in his touch. Fischer nodded, feeling a tug of gravity on his head, his eyelids. "Sure. Yeah. That's a good idea, Nick."

#####

#####

Like the Studio Lounge at Waterstone's, Kittredge's was located above a bookstore; unlike the Studio, Kittredge's and its below-stairs shop kept hours either very late or very early, depending on one's diurnal point of view. The effect was that of an after-hours reading room that just happened to serve alcohol. Patrons trudged up the worn wooden stairs bearing books from below; they slouched, coat-wrapped, cozy, in the bar's collection of stuffed ancient furniture, their pint glasses making rings on reading tables or on the hardwood floor near their feet. The place was crowded tonight; Susan made her way, with Eames in tow, to the farther of the room's two corner booths, just opening up, tucked up against the windows. During the day, there'd be a view of the building opposite and of the street one story below; now the arched glass was obsidian black, downstreaked with melting snow. Though the place was by all appearances serve-yourself, such a policy ran contrary to reverie and book-based contemplation; hence, to keep the establishment's more-liquid forms of revenue flowing, the help regularly ventured onto the floor to take orders (and to snag the odd extra tip). As Eames and Susan slid onto opposite benches in the corner booth, a hardfaced dark-haired woman in black jeans and a black t-shirt disensconced herself from behind the bar and came to take their order.

"Sparkling water, mint garnish, please," said Susan.

The woman looked to Eames. The word _blbliophile_ was centered on her sternum in white letters maybe a centimeter high. Eames, noting, raised his eyebrows slightly, amiably, as though he'd been issued a challenge.

"Campari and soda, love."

The woman had spotted the eyebrows; the "love" did nothing to soften her. "Right," was all she said.

Eames didn't quite shrug at her retreating back. "You could have ordered a real drink, darling," he said to Susan. "You know you're safe with me."

"You're looking good, Eames," Susan countered. Not as a come-on, more to shift the focus away from the fact that she did indeed want something stronger than water.

"So are you, Gaumont. Then again, a woman is never more ravishing than when she's been recently ravished." A slow smile on his full lips. "Am I right?"

"Mm."

"Dare I ask if he's— I'll assume that it's nothing but boys, and those of legal age, for our straight-laced Susie— is he anyone I know?"

"Robert Fischer."

As close as Eames would ever come to a surprise free and clear of adjectives. With near-preternatural speed and subtlety, their drinks had arrived. In the market for tips, not half-hearted roguish flirtation, the bartender was already back at her station.

"You know Mr. Fischer?" Susan asked, reaching casually for her glass.

"You had a hand in his dream-training, I take it."

"Induction-level, that's all."

"Ah, yes. The rough-out team. May I ask who your Michelangelos were?"

"Of course you can't."

"Even though rules were made to be bent, if not broken?"

"Spoons are made for bending. I daresay you were made for bending, too."

"If I hadn't been born bent, correct?" Eames smiled. He glanced casually around at the dark room, the unwatching eyes of the other patrons. Then he reached across the narrow table and caught Susan by her upper right arm, unerringly, at exactly the point at which the force of a low-altitude ejection from a crashing fighter jet had once splintered her humerus. "Better to bend than to break, don't you think?"

The crash, the result of a dream-tech delusion that killed Tom Warwick, her partner and co-pilot, had been five years ago. At Eames's touch, the memory of it became current thought; the pain and panic resurrected themselves shockingly fresh. Susan stifled a flinch. She kept her eyes calmly on Eames's as she removed his hand from her arm.

"Better you leave the physical threats to Arthur, darling," she said. "You spend half your time playing girls."

Eames chuckled as, thus prompted, he withdrew his hand. "And Arthur, I dare say, spends half his time wishing he could."

"There's no law that says he couldn't."

"Ah, but there's _Arthur's_ law." Eames gestured to a passing Kittredge barkeep. "The same, please," he said to her. Only she wasn't. The same, that is. Their first server was pulling a pint behind the bar; their new attendant was young college-aged, brown-haired, pale-skinned and freckled, with an expression that seemed less resentful of the fact that she was waiting tables than inordinately pensive. Susan could imagine the core crew of Philosophy 301— Plato, Descartes, Aquinas— weaving a conversation behind the girl's green eyes. With less erudition, Eames tracked the sway of her slender hips, the motion that of willow branches in a breeze, as she walked away. "I've always harbored the fond thought that you and Arthur were meant for one another, Susan."

Whereas Eames, a forger, an illusionist and master of disguise in the realm of dream-tech, was as pliant in his ethics as the hindquarters of the girl he was watching, young Arthur, a point-man for the dream-teams with which he worked, an organizer, a researcher, was strict: in his discipline, his intelligence, his loyalties. Eames met the world with dimples and half-winks; Arthur's gaze could be as inexorable as that of a shark. He had a shark's flat-dark eyes and sleekness, too, a hard slenderness, black hair. He possessed the moral core that Eames quite nonchalantly lacked.

"Where is Arthur?" Susan asked.

"In the States. Watching over Cobb from a discreet distance."

"Where's Cobb, Eames?"

Dom Cobb, genius, madman. One of the pioneers of illicit dream-tech, after the governments of the United States and several other countries worldwide finally abandoned the technology as a means of training military personnel. After Tom died in that crashing jet, after Susan nearly lost her life. The details were piecemeal— the closer you got to anything related to the 'tech, the less clear the answers became— but, as Susan understood it, Cobb had suffered a catastrophic mental breakdown following the death of his wife. More than that, more magnificently strange, Cobb was rumored to have lost his mind not just in the traditional sense, not in terms of schizophrenia, psychosis, or catatonia, but within a dreamworld of his own making.

"With Miles. That's what you really wanted to ask, wasn't it?"

"One more, then," Susan countered. "Where is Miles, Eames?"

This, then, on top of the Dantean firsts, yet another level of bizarre: the man who coordinated the activities of Susan and her team as a first-level dream-tech training squad for the filthy rich and industrial elite who feared the theft of their secrets by rogue 'techers like Cobb and Eames, was Cobb's father-in-law.

"Los Angeles. And there they are... either out, or—" A thoughtful frown. "No more than half a level down."

"They're dreaming?"

"I thought you—" Eames caught himself. A smile like a shield. "It's that voice, Susan. Like sweet cream sherry. Why you're not making real money doing radio adverts I can only—"

"Eames."

"Honestly, I thought you knew."

"Tell me."

"Suppose it can't hurt. Cobb has had himself largely locked away down below for—" He paused, frowned, whistled softly. "— I really couldn't begin to say."

"Since Mallory died."

"It split him asunder. A lightning bolt to the heart of an oak. He's not a bad fellow, Susan, not really."

"No. He simply does reprehensible things. Or did. So he dream-dove after Mal died and never came all the way up. And now..."

"You tell me, Sue. I've said enough."

"... Miles is trying to lure him back to the surface."

She stopped. The implications were dizzying. A bit destabilizing. Susan reached for her fresh drink; she asked, half of herself: "How many of us has Miles involved in this?"

"I can't say." Eames held his hands open, looked at Susan frankly. "Honestly, I don't know. But he's close this time, Susan. Very close. Suppose we can thank your new boyfriend for that."

"I'll ask anyway: Did you send him to us?"

"Who? Not Fischer—"

"Yes: Fischer."

"Now, why would I— ah. You're thinking I wanted a bit of wetwork done on the sly."

"He was mentally unstable and armed with a Colt thirty-eight."

"_Not_ my brand of choice."

"Arthur, I'm thinking, still has a shred of conscience buried under that barracuda exterior of his, whereas—"

"— whereas I, on the other hand, could slip oh-so-easily from 'rogue' to 'murderer.'"

"Whilst slipping a revolver into Mr. Fischer's jacket pocket."

"He didn't get the gun from me, Susan. That I swear."

"And our address?"

"You'll have to blame that one on your answering service. Check the bank accounts of your receptionists— unless you're gracing callers with your own dulcet tones— which you should be, by the way: you could sell tusks to walruses with that voice— and see who's made the largest recent deposit. I'm guessing Mr. Fischer did the old-fashioned thing, darling: he paid for the information he wanted."

Susan asked, thinking of the man who had followed her from Bloomsbury: "So how long have you been trailing us and him?"

"Who's to say I've been—"

Susan fixed him with a gorgon's stare; Eames chuckled.

"About three days. I had him followed him as far as the museum. Then my fellow left him to his own devices. We couldn't very well walk him right to your door, now, could we?"

"But your thug could have hung about to comb through the premises once Fischer murdered us."

"When you're this frank, it's a veritable slap in the face. Positively bracing."

"I could upgrade it to an actual slap in the face, if you'd find it more stimulating."

"What was I supposed to do? Ring you up to warn you that a milquetoast industrialist was headed your way with indecision in his heart?"

"I'm being serious, Eames," Susan said. She waited until he'd exorcised the devilment from his expression, extinguished some of the spark in his eyes. "When he showed up tonight— At first he thought it was all our fault, what had been done to him. Mine, the team's. At first, listening to him, I thought he was right. We were supposed to train him, weren't we? To keep him mentally secure? But what he described didn't sound like typical mental espionage. He was convinced that he'd been compromised, but he was also convinced that his attackers hadn't stolen an idea from him: they'd left one behind. And they'd tried to cover it up: a sort of mental whitewash regarding his father, their relationship. But, of course, it wasn't a natural sense of resolution. It wasn't _his_. His mind has been fighting it, and that supposed implanted idea, for months now. I'd go so far as to say it's nearly driven him insane. But he remembers you, Eames. He says you were there, in realtime. You, and someone else who was very likely Cobb. So, I need to ask, bluntly—"

"What it was we did to him."

"You can tell me. Because you know there's nothing I can do about it."

"Aside from that promised slap." His expression was almost sympathetic. "How frustrating it must be, Susan. You train those poor little rich things to defend themselves from nasty dream-thieves like me, and when they come up rumbled, there's not a policeman or a court in the world to which you can turn. No justice, is there?"

"Tell me, Eames."

"All part of Miles's scheme to lure Cobb back to level one. Back to realtime. You know what it is that people like Dom and I do for a living, correct?"

"Jesus, Eames, don't patronize me. I'm not in the mood."

He said, anyway: "Extraction. Thought-theft. Garden-variety dream-burglary. To hook Cobb, Miles had to serve up something a bit more exotic. A bit more challenging. Have you heard of something called 'inception,' Susan?"

"No."

"Something just-past the opposite of extraction." Eames removed the cocktail straw from his glass, sucked it dry, began absently to wrap it in white-and-red spirals around his left index finger. "We plant an idea in the dreamer's mind, and plant it so deeply, that he thinks it's his."

"That's not possible."

"To egos such as yours and, yes, mine: no. But to a self-styled master of the trade like Dom—"

"Oh, my God. Hadn't he any idea of the damage he could do? Hadn't you?"

"Dearest, Miles hired me for my wit, not for my sterling sense of morality. And he was running out of options. This wasn't the first time he tried to bring Dom back up. Scenarios based on traditional jobs, traditional extractions, wouldn't cut it any more. Dom's too bright for that. You see, don't you? Your Mr. Fischer couldn't have been a plant. He certainly couldn't have been something as one-dimensional and stupid as a projection. Miles had tried it before, and Dom saw through it. He'd become too paranoid, too suspicious."

"Too guilt-ridden?"

"Odd you should say it, but yes."

"Cobb had tried inception before, hadn't he?"

"I can only assume."

"On whom, Eames?"

"I couldn't say. Honestly, Susan, I don't know."

"Someone close to him."

"Very likely."

"It couldn't have been— Not Mallory. God—"

"Your guess is as good as mine."

"Who else did Miles hire this time?"

"Besides me and— obviously— Arthur, a new girl, inquisitive but ultimately compliant, as our architect. Ariadne, she called herself, though I doubt that was her real name. One of Miles's students, supposedly. A chemist by the name of Youssef. And, I later found out, a junior professor of economics from Miles's university in Paris. Japanese fellow. Played the part of a businessman called Saito, his corporation being a top rival of Mr. Fischer's. He was quite good, actually."

Susan was shaking. "Fischer was the only honest element, the only _real_ element, in the whole scenario."

"Well, if we must look at it like that, proceeding on a scale ranging from 'clued-in' to 'clueless,' Cobb was 'honest,' too. Like I said, Miles had tried this before. Tried and failed. He's an old man, Susan. It's not like that bloody song: he hasn't all the time in the world."

Susan kept her eyes on her glass, as if a stare cold and hard enough could transform plain water into vodka. She was savagely in need of a real drink. Through her silence, Eames sipped his Campari. He scratched his ear, sighed, leaned a bit closer to her.

"He isn't to blame." He spoke more softly than he had hitherto. Not seductively, though. Nor on the arc of a con. Had Susan not been upset, she might have marked the occasion as iconic: Eames attempting sincerity. "Miles isn't. You certainly aren't— God, why can't it be Arthur explaining this? He does 'earnest' so much more believably.— Your Mr. Fischer was, I'm sure, trained as thoroughly as he could have been. As much as he needed to be. He simply wasn't trained for the right thing. For Miles's plan to work—" He shrugged; he waited until she was looking at him before he finished: "Awareness can corrupt at any level, Susan. You know that."

"What he did was dangerous," she said. "More than that, it was cruel. Unforgivably cruel."

"Nothing that can't be fixed," Eames countered. "At least Mr. Fischer still has a solid connection to top-level reality. He'll survive, Susie. You'll see to it, I'm sure."

Susan slid out of the booth, stood. "I've heard enough."

Eames watched her take a folding of notes from her wallet, reached for his own billfold. "Hold on. I've got this."

"Thank you, Eames: no. I'm feeling used enough as it is."

He shrugged, slipping his wallet back into his pocket. Susan noted, however, how he couldn't help rising when she did, a full if brief standing before he settled back into the booth, no doubt to wait for Miss Philosophy 301 to tell him when her shift was done. _A gentleman stands when a woman does, _she thought. _All the little things that betray us, Eames; am I right?_

#####

He didn't follow her.

But his follower did.

He manifested himself from shadow, from jagged lightning-strikes of neon and the the cold fluorescent glow of store windows, just north of Wardour, right where Susan had lost him before: the shaggy tall man in a long dark coat. As before, he kept between them a precise twenty meters; as before, she didn't confront him. He followed her back to Bloomsbury. She turned a bit too far, checking for traffic before she crossed Great Russell Street: he'd disappeared.

She went back to the house.

#####

When she got home, film dialogue was coming from the workroom. A boy's voice, British, strident in warning: "Mum! Dad! Don't touch it! It's evil!" Fischer was nowhere in sight. Susan caught a whiff of cooking from downstairs as she hung her coat in the entryway closet. Emerging from his grotto of monitors and CPUs, Nick knotted his knuckles behind his back and stretched his lanky arms. One of his shoulders emitted an audible _pop_. "Well, how was it?" he asked. "Wherever it was?"

Susan hesitated. "It was... a lot to digest, actually."

"Anything we need to be worried about?"

"I'm not sure. I'll let you know in the morning, okay? Think I need to sleep on it."

"Okay."

Susan looked toward the stairs leading to the upper floor. "Did he come down?"

"Yeah. Wiped out Chris's quiche, I think. Last I heard, he was going to shave and go back to bed."

Susan felt herself go pale. "Christ, Nick, you didn't give him a razor."

"You said he wasn't dangerous."

"I never said he wasn't suicidal."

"The hell, Susie: what do you think I gave him, a fucking katana? He's got my electric shaver. If he manages to cut his throat with that, we chalk it up to Darwin."

"Not funny, Nick."

#####

She left Nick to his movie and his work and went downstairs to make herself a sandwich, Romaine and thin-sliced deli beef on pale rye, a glass of filtered water. She ate mechanically, then remained where she was at the dining table for a long time, staring at her empty plate.

She stood, suddenly, the legs of her chair catching on the old linoleum, took her glass and her plate, half-dropped the plate clattering onto a plate already in the kitchen sink; she yanked open the door of the freezer below the fridge, rummaged, came up with a bottle of Grey Goose. Untwisted the frosted cap with shaking fingers, poured over the sink's drain-rack the water from her glass, and half-filled the glass with liquor.

Then held the open bottle over the sink while she poured the contents of her glass back into it. Vodka dribbled onto her fingers. She re-capped the bottle, rinsed and dried the neck on a terry towel hung through a metal loop hung hip-level to the right of the sink. She rinsed and dried her fingertips, then, too.

"Shit," she whispered, clutching the edge of the countertop.

She could call Miles. Normally, he called her, called the team, when he needed them for a job. She had a number for him, though, for emergencies. This, she thought, a betrayal on this scale, would qualify as an emergency.

Or not.

He had once saved her life. Literally pulled her back from a drug-and-alcohol-assisted suicide in the Thames. Since then, she'd considered him a decent man, a mentor, a confidant, a friend. Were she to call him now, she would speak out of anger and betrayal. She would say something she would later regret.

_Tomorrow_, she thought. The recriminations could wait at least until then.

She returned the bottle of vodka to its burying-place in the freezer and went upstairs.

#####

Nick's movie was no longer playing; his monitors were asleep or swirling with screensavers, unwatched. Nick himself no doubt was sleeping, too, or filling his head with music, ear-budded, in the comfort of his bed in his room upstairs. The house was very quiet.

A muffled creaking as she climbed the narrow stairs to the upper floor. The door to her bedroom was slightly ajar. Light dim enough to be that from her reading lamp carved a soft wedge from the shadows on the hall carpeting. She went in.

Robert Fischer was in her bed much as she had left him, on his back, covered to his midriff, asleep. His face, however, freshly shaven, had transformed. His beauty was a revelation. She found herself holding her breath, looking at him.

She closed the door, went quietly to her closet. Hesitated with her hand on a the hangered shoulder of a longsleeved blue-and-black-checked men's flannel shirt that she used as a nightgown. She stepped back from the closet, stripped down, hung her sweater in the closet, folded her jeans neatly over the back of the chair at her computer desk, and climbed under the covers beside him. He was still nude. She wanted no advantage over him: she should be as vulnerable as he was.

She was reaching to switch off the lamp when he said, softly:

"I was looking at the photos on your walls. Hope you don't mind."

She left the lamp on. "No," she said, settling on her side, facing him. "Points fixed in time, aren't they? Memories that won't change." The words were a form of reassurance. Something she could confess to someone with whom she was lying quietly, naked, in bed.

His eyes in the dim light were luminous, gentle, practically unearthly. "Do your memories change, Susan?"

She countered quietly: "Don't yours?"

He hesitated, looking at her; he asked, finally: "Where did you go?"

"To see that man Eames. I was restless; you were obviously exhausted." She smiled slightly, traced the smooth skin of his jaw with gentle fingertips. "You were dreaming."

He smiled back at her. "Do you want to know what I was dreaming?"

"Tell me."

"I dreamt I was eating ice cream."

Susan laughed softly; he did, too. Another moment of hesitation before he asked, more seriously:

"What did he say?"

She kissed his lips. "I wanted to wait, to tell you in the morning."

Fischer caressed the hair near her right temple. "Why?"

"I was being selfish." She looked at him evenly, her heart suddenly feeling as cold and hopeless and heavy as lead. "I wanted one night, like this, without you hating me. Without you feeling that I'd betrayed you."

"I know you didn't betray me."

"That we— that I failed you, then."

"Tell me what Eames told you."

She explained it for him then, her voice sounding clinical and distant in her own ears, the explanation itself seeming, if anything, even more impossible now than when Eames had given it to her. In sum, she confirmed Fischer's fears while weakly affirming his sanity.

"You were right," she said, summing up. "They placed an idea in your mind, through your dreams." She swallowed; she added, as ridiculously as a recording: "We will, of course, refund the cost of your training."

"The money isn't important, Susan. You should know that. I just wanted an answer; you've given me one. I'm grateful for that." Fischer frowned, though not at her; he rolled onto his back, stared up at the darkness-distant ceiling. She felt him tense. "Where's my gun? You gave it to Nick. Where did he put it?"

"I won't tell you that tonight." Susan rubbed his chest. He caught her hand, held it. His grip was almost painfully tight. "You manage to find Eames," she said calmly. "You shoot him. Then what?"

"I go to trial." His tone was flat. "I am convicted of murder."

"If the charge isn't commuted to manslaughter by reason of insanity."

Fischer continued: "I tell the court, I tell the world: the man I shot was one of several people who invaded my dreams and planted in my mind the idea that I should destroy my multi-billion-dollar corporation."

"'You are quite, quite mad, Mr. Fischer,' the court replies."

"I am quite mad, Your Honor." He swallowed. He loosened his grip but didn't release her.

"This wasn't a standard act of espionage, Robert," Susan said. "Had they stolen an idea, we could proceed on, say, allegations of a business-practices violation. Or theft of copyright. And even then we would have but the flimsiest chance of making the charges stick. This is different." What she couldn't stand, at least for now, was to tell him who was truly behind the attack on him. She needed to speak to Miles first, on her own, face to face.

"So what do I do?" Fischer asked.

She lay beside him, feeling, between them, a distance nearly as profound as that of death. Less than a millimeter, yet utterly uncrossable. She knew she should stop the discussion where it was, invite him to stay where he was until morning; she could move to one of the house's empty rooms for the remainder of the night. Still, there remained one troubling fact:

"He had you followed. He had me followed, too. Tonight."

"Eames?"

"Yes."

Fischer rolled back onto his side, propped himself on his elbow to look down at her. "Why?"

"He wouldn't say, not directly. My guess is he's had wind of something involving you."

Maybe she should have despised herself for how desperately she wanted him not to hate her. Or, even worse, for him not to feel anything for her, to be beyond caring.

"Can we find out what it is?" he asked.

Not _you_: _we_.

A wash of relief, at the question, the wording. "We can certainly try," she replied.

"In the morning?" His voice was half-mumble. He was still tired; answers, anger, or no, he ought to have been.

Susan sat up, looked down at him tenderly. "In the morning."

Fischer reached for her. "Where are you going?"

"We'd probably sleep better alone."

"This is your bed. Please: stay."

He drew her back down. She allowed him to. Plenty of room in the bed, even for all the guilt she was feeling. And they seemed to fit together well. Reality, there, too, with him, and she found herself drawn to it: the shift of flesh and muscle, textures, nudges, the warmth of his skin.

He murmured, nearly asleep: "I think I left whiskers in your sink. I'm sorry."

Susan replied, smiling, as she reached to switch off the lamp: "I forgive you."

She settled herself beside him in the dark, closed her eyes, slept.

#####

#####

#####


	4. Chapter 4

**A/N:** Holy cats, sorry for the delay! This chapter got a little bit (more like a lotta-bit) out of hand. But it's jam-packed with stuff. Take your time; enjoy; fire off a missive if you feel so inclined. As always, welcome to the weirdness, and thanks for stopping by!

#####

#####

The curtains were open. Fischer, lying on his back, looked through a pleasant intoxication of sleep from the ceiling of Susan's room, silver-white in the morning light, to the room's window. The sun was up; the sky above the British Museum was high and clear and blue. But the light had yet to reach universally groundward: the museum's near wall and windows were still gray with shadow.

Beside him, Susan shifted, sighed out a long breath. Fischer rolled onto his side to face her. He found himself half holding his own breath: it occurred to him that he'd never before watched a woman wake up.

She was lying beside him on her left side, her right hand clasped loosely at the base of her throat, as if she were holding closed a collar or a scarf. "Mm," she said, distantly. Her eyes beneath their lids flicked in movement; she frowned mildly. She might have been ending a conversation in a dream.

Then she opened her eyes. A moment as she focused: she looked at him affectionately through a dusting of sleep. "Morning," she murmured.

"Morning," Fischer echoed, softly.

"Did you sleep okay?"

"Yes."

"Any more dreams?"

"None that I remember." He paused, spotting something over her shoulder: his suit and dress shirt from last night were hangered neatly from a hook two-thirds of the way up the room's closed door. His boxers and socks were folded over the top of the chair at the computer desk.

Susan leaned back, following his line of sight. "Ah. Nick finished the laundry."

Fischer frowned. It was one thing for Nick to be wandering in and out when Fischer was alone, and subject to mental-stability observation; it was quite another, at least for modesty's sake, in his opinion, when Susan was part of the equation. "He just walked in while we were sleeping?"

"House rules: you knock, and if there's no answer, you're free to enter."

"There are no locks?"

"There are locks. We don't usually use them, that's all." She looked back at him, countering his consternation with an expression of clear-complected patience. "We've all three of us seen each other in varying states of unconsciousness. You might say trust is implicit to the job." She brushed his frowning lips with light fingertips; Fischer felt his expression soften at her touch. "Nick is a little obsessive when it comes to the wash: he worked at a dry cleaner's years back. Chris is our uncloseted gourmand, as Nick calls him, and he doesn't mind doing dishes. I tend to get stuck with the general cleaning, which is okay: I find hoovering to be quite relaxing, actually."

Smiling at the thought of her looking meditative while helming a Dyson, Fischer reached to smooth hair away from Susan's eyes. "So what happens today?"

"For starters, we go to your hotel, get your things."

"Isn't it a bit early for us to be moving in together?"

She chuckled, mirroring his caress. "I think you'll be more comfortable here. We've a number of spare rooms."

"More comfortable... or more easily overseen?"

"You're looking much better this morning," she replied.

Fischer followed her change in tack without argument. "I'm feeling much better. Which doesn't necessarily mean I should instantly be left to my own devices, correct?"

"You're free to leave at any time. But—"

"— but?"

"I would feel better if you stayed. I think Nick would, too."

Fischer shifted closer, nuzzled her cheek. "Would it be selfish of me to admit I find your concern more compelling?"

Susan smiled as he kissed his way along her jawline, tipped her head to allow him to nibble and lick at her pulse point. She looked back far enough, arching enticingly against him, to see the black digital clock on her nightstand. It was Fischer's turn to follow her line of sight. Twenty-eight minutes past eight. "The thing is," Susan said, "after all that precipitation last night, the roads will be slick until the sun is well up. About an hour or so."

"What could we possibly find to do for an hour?"

"Mm, I wonder." She kissed him. As she did, she massaged his belly, rubbed lower still. Tugged oh-so-gently at his pubic hair, caressed his scrotum. By the time she grasped his penis, he was more than half erect.

Fischer said, a little hoarsely, as she fondled him: "If I might make a suggestion."

"Please do."

Fischer rolled her onto her back, kissing her. He lowered his head, cupped her left breast, opened his mouth over the areola. Susan gasped as he tongued her nipple, then shared his attentions languorously with the breast on the right.

"Here—"

She caught his free hand, guided it lower, between her legs. His fingertips brushed her clitoris; she moved his hand farther back. She was looking into his eyes as she guided the tip of his middle finger between the lips of her labia, pressed it through the opening of her vagina, and demonstrated for him a steady, sinuous pumping.

"Got it," he whispered.

He slowly added his ring finger, pushed past his second knuckles into her as Susan re-grasped his penis. Fischer paused—

"Show me," she said, gently.

He hesitated, embarrassed.

A twinkling in her eyes as she stroked his erection; she ran her tongue-tip under his upper lip as she rubbed her clitoris against the heel of his thrusting hand and as much as breathed the words into his mouth: "You can finger-fuck me, but I'm not supposed to know that you masturbate?"

He grasped her grasping hand, looked into her eyes as he demonstrated his preferred rhythm of pull-squeeze-and-release. He kissed her on the cusp of a long, slow gasp as she caught on; they kissed hungrily, wildly, then, as they touched one another. But he was at an age, or it was a point at which, he wanted more of her; he had to have more of her.

"I— Susan, God, I want to be inside you—"

She drew him nearer, whispered, urgently, close to his ear: "I need you inside me."

A quick shifting of torsos, a parting of thighs; she guided him home. Fischer pushed slowly into her all the way to to his scrotum, paused to sort the sensations, the slick sliding heat as her body accommodated his; he started to thrust. It occurred to him just then, the room's cool air meeting the skin on his back, his body in motion working its way clear of the blanket and sheet, that anyone looking from the museum's second-floor office windows would have a perfect view of the proceedings; it occurred to him, just as quickly, that he didn't care in the least. Susan relaxed beneath him, squeezed his buttocks, pulling him deeper.

"No: wait—" Still not enough. Fischer sat back, drawing her with him. Let the fossils across the way get an eyeful. Fog their bifocals, clear away their curator's cobwebs. He pulled Susan up onto his lap, wrapped her in his arms; a moan escaped her as he flexed his thighs, strong from running and swimming, and thrust up into her.

He said, to the question in her eyes, to her lips parted and breathless: "You're so beautiful. I just wanted to hold you while we— while we—"

She caressed his face. "It's alright. No: better than that." Tipping her forehead to his while she began to counter his thrusts with a rise-and-fall undulation of her own. "It's like making love to an angel."

#####

She preceded him in orgasm; he kept thrusting upward, slowly, into her delicious warm contractions, until he could no longer hold back. The force of his release took his breath, arched his spine; he pushed into her as deeply as he could, her torso wrapped in his arms. Susan clung to him in return—

"— God, oh God—"

— holding him as close as was humanly possible, squeezing him with her thighs as well as her arms, sitting high in his lap. Fischer nuzzled her throat, her jaw, grazed the skin of her shoulder with his teeth. Susan found his mouth with hers, kissed him slowly, very deeply. Fischer, the spasms in his loins slowing, losing intensity, the lust calming from his mind and body, gazed into her beautiful blue-gray eyes.

"Now we have a problem," he said, quietly breathless.

She kissed his nose-tip. "And what's that?"

"I want to go back to sleep."

Susan laid her head against his shoulder. "A nice brisk shower will fix that."

Fischer squeezed her gently. "Care to join me?"

"Mm mm. That would only lead to an evil repeating cycle."

"Shower, screw, shower, screw...?"

"Ad infinitum. We'd never get anything done today."

"My calendar's wide open."

"So's mine," she whispered, her lips brushing his ear. "But we have things to do." She eased reluctantly away from Fischer's embrace, met his eyes. "Go on: you can go first. I have a couple of calls to make. I can use the shower in Nick's room if need be."

Expelled, thus, gently from paradise, Fischer shifted away, sat for a moment looking back at her from the bed's edge. "How does he rate a bathroom and you don't?"

"One: he has more overnight guests than I do, now that he and his boyfriend have decided that the long-distance thing really wasn't working." Susan grinned, a little ruefully. "And, two, we tossed for it, and I lost."

#####

It would be approximately one a.m. in Los Angeles. Catching people right out of sleep, though, was easier than catching them fully awake. An idea as relevant to combat, both in reality and in dreamtime, as to tricking a contact into answering the phone without first checking his or her caller i.d. Susan got out of bed while Fischer, his modesty obviously blossoming in the light of day, stepped into his clean undershorts before venturing out into the hall; while she took her cell phone from the pocket of her jeans, she treated herself to a look at him, his slender, compact build, his tight buttocks, the lean musculature of his chest and legs and arms.

_Beautiful_, she thought. _Absolutely beautiful._ As if he heard, Fischer turned and offered her a shy smile; Susan felt herself blush as she smiled back.

When he'd gone, and shut the door behind him, she dialed the number Miles had given her as an emergency contact. She kept the number in her own memory, not in the phone's address book; she wondered, briefly, as the ringing began, if such knowledge were worth extraction.

After the fifth ring, Miles said, his tone, as always, calm and clipped: _Hello, there—_

"Miles, it's Susan. I need to ask you someth—"

_— whatever it is must be very important. You'll have my full attention as soon as possible. Until then_—

"— Damn it, Miles—"

_— please leave a message. Oh, and do wait for the tone. Talk to you soon_.

She waited for the tone. Waited maybe three seconds longer while she silently thought, phrased. "Miles, it's Susan," she said, finally. "I have a question regarding the Fischer job. Call me, please. Good bye."

She hung up, cleared the number from re-dial, slipped into the long flannel shirt she used as a nightgown, and went to Nick's room to shower.

#####

Fischer, clean and clothed, started downstairs. Susan had vacated her room by the time he returned to dress. Which was just as well: as she'd said, they couldn't very well fuck all day, could they?

_Well, yes, _his body countered, refreshed and willing, _they could. Absolutely they could._ Fischer smiled to himself— and then he heard a man's voice say from below, from the vicinity of the workroom:

"How the hell hard can it be to salt a fucking sidewalk?"

— and his testes as much as hoisted themselves into his abdominal cavity.

He knew that voice, the American-Midwest growl of it, the reckless threat of it, from his dreams. The fact that those dreams had been planned, staged as part of his mental-defense training over a year ago, mattered not a bit. As his attraction to Susan had started within a dreamscape, so had his fear of the man called Chris, and that fear, though dream-initiated, was every bit as real to Fischer as said attraction to Susan was.

He nearly tiptoed to the doorway of the workroom. Chris was inside, his back half to the door, talking to Nick while he ate what looked to be an entire packet's worth of Wheatabix from a green plastic bowl big enough to double as a motorcycle helmet. Dismayingly enough, nightmare-dreamscape-Chris hadn't been an exaggeration: the man in reality was over six feet tall if he was an inch, his walnut-brown hair like a soldier's, cropped close to his skull, and muscle filled the shoulders, chest, and arms of the gray sweatshirt he wore. Fischer flinched when he saw him.

"Hey, good morning," called Nick, leaned as he was, coffee mug in hand, against the big work table. He'd traded last night's brown hoody for a black one with a the silhouette of a narwhal appliqued in green across the chest.

"Good morning," Fischer replied, his eyes still on Chris, his tone much as it would be if he were joining a meeting-in-progress regarding the discovery of a vital hazard at a Fischer-Morrow co-generation site. A rupture, say, in the cooling tower of a major nuclear facility.

Chris turned, looked at Fischer. His eyes, as they'd been in one too many nightmares, were too-dark blue, nearly black. The expression on his shit-yes-I-know-I'm-handsome face stalled out at an annoyed frown. He didn't even bother with a sneer.

"We're offering babysitting services now?" he asked Nick.

Nick ignored him. "You'll have to forgive Mr. Hanson," he said to Fischer. "He went butt-surfing on the cruel streets of London this chilly a.m., and he bruised his delicate ego."

"It's that stupid red sand," Chris grumbled, spooning up another mouthful of Wheatabix. "This is an island, man. Right? Right in the fucking Atlantic. Road salt oughtta be easy enough to get."

"Have trouble getting home, Chris?" Susan asked, joining Fischer in the doorway. Her dark hair was still damp; she wore jeans and a deep blue sweater less threadbare than the black sweater of the previous evening, and her scent, warm and shower-fresh, carried a hint of grapefruit soap. She eased near, rubbed Fischer's lower back.

"No. No, Sue, it's okay." Chris looked at her, and her proximity to Fischer, and his expression changed. It didn't soften, exactly, but it seemed to lose a splinter or two of granite.

"The session went as planned?"

"Aside from the fact that I still don't know why those jokers are the A-team and we're the B-stringers, yeah."

"Chris was helping one of our other training teams with a particularly- shall we say- unreceptive client," Susan said to Fischer.

"Not like you," Nick added. "You took to it pretty quickly."

Like Susan, he was looking primarily at Chris as he spoke.

Chris cleared his throat. "All that training stuff: you know it was part of the job, right?" He met Fischer's eyes unapologetically. "Getting hit? Stabbed? All the big-scare tactics?"

Fischer nodded. "Yeah."

"No hard feelings?" Chris put his cereal bowl on the work table, offered Fischer his right hand. As Fischer shook it, he added: "Of course, if you hurt Sue, I'll hit you so fucking hard you'll never get up."

"A million short years of evolution, Chris, and you may come within striking distance of subtlety," Susan said.

"Is he moving in?"

"Yes," she replied. "We have the room."

"Not to mention, it would be safer," Nick added.

Fischer looked from him to Susan. "Safer than what, exactly?"

"Eames wouldn't have had you followed on a whim. I'm thinking— or I'm thinking Nick's thinking, and he's apt to be right— that he's had wind of something that involves you. While Eames himself isn't partial to strong-arm tactics, at least not that I've seen, that's not to say that he's the only one keeping an eye on you. So I will echo Nick: it would be safer, at least until we figure out if you are, indeed, a person of interest."

"To anyone other than Susan, that is," Chris said.

"Someday, Chris, you'll give in and let that gay freak-flag fly," Nick murmured.

"The fuck does that mean?"

Nick winked at Fischer. "He thinks you're hot. He's just too much of a manly man to admit it."

"Fucker," Chris muttered.

"Let's go get your things," Susan said to Fischer. She left the workroom, took a set of car keys from a hook inside the cage-room.

"Maybe he packed more than a shoebox worth of stuff," Chris said, leaning into the doorframe. "You should take the Ford."

"No, I don't have much more than—" Fischer stopped, recalling: over a week ago, leaving Sydney with really nothing more than an overnight bag, the suit on his back, a head full of confusion and paranoia.

"I'll tell you this," Chris said to him, "you get in that Mini with Miss Former Jet-Pilot, and you'll be re-thinking your safety needs in no time flat."

#####

To her credit, Susan confined her roadplay to a single trick: No need for valet parking. She landed them near The 41 in a spot that Fischer was certain the Mini could only have entered via teleportation. He got out a moment after she did, after a bit of puzzlement identifying the door handle; Susan half-nodded to their right as she locked the doors and pocketed the car keys.

"See him?" she asked, quietly.

Half a block away, a tall, lean man with shaggy black hair, his hands pushed into the pockets of a brown trenchcoat, was making too much of a show of interest in the baubles on display in a jewelry-store window. Quite possibly he knew he'd been spotted. Fischer excused a glance in his direction by pushing his hair back off his forehead.

"Yes. Who is he?"

"I'm not sure." Susan walked toward the entrance to the hotel; Fischer followed. "He tailed me to Soho last night."

The question was too obvious; Fischer asked it anyway: "Should we confront him?"

"No. Not yet. He shouldn't be a problem inside the hotel; I doubt they'd let him past the desk. Just keep your eyes open."

#####

The green-liveried doorman tapped the brim of his hat and admitted them; the desk staff voiced polite welcome-backs; Susan and Fischer rode the lift to the hotel's top floor. He took his key-card from his wallet, opened the door to the suite. Susan stepped inside, looked about, emitted a soft, admiring whistle.

"Sure you wouldn't rather stay here?" Fischer asked. Her demeanor was catching; he felt safe with her. As the door clicked shut, he turned her to face him, his right hand on her hip. Just a moment alone, light from the skylight filling the room. He kissed her; she parted her lips for him, closing her eyes, relaxing into the contact.

Then, gently but firmly, she pushed away from him. "Don't tempt me."

Still, she leaned down to feel the down comforter on the bed, to test the mattress. Fischer, smiling as he tucked his wallet back into his breast pocket, went to gather his toiletries from the bathroom. The wallet didn't slide easily back into place: he felt something bunch and crumple under it.

"What the—"

He pulled his wallet back out. With it he pulled free a slip of white paper. It fluttered into the air and came to rest on the carpet near Susan's feet. She bent to pick it up.

"I thought you said you hadn't any other baggage," she said, examining it.

She offered it to Fischer as he came closer. It was a ticket for left luggage.

"I haven't," he said. "Should we go pick it up?"

Susan frowned thoughtfully. "No," she said. "Not yet."

#####

Combined with the spotting of their rough-headed specter, finding the ticket resurrected the paranoia Fischer had brought with him to London. Once he'd checked out and they were walking back to the Mini, he found himself fighting an urge to look behind them, to see whether, unlike Peter Pan, they'd managed not to lose their shadow. Susan key-clicked the car doors; "The boot's unlocked," she said. Fischer loaded his overnight bag, reached up to re-shut the hatch lid, rounded the Mini's stubby back end. Behind the wheel, Susan was on her cell. Fischer got into the passenger seat, shut the door, belted himself in.

"— a bit of shopping and an early lunch," she was saying, her elegant voice casually clear. "Mm hm." Partly out of nerves, partly out of politeness, Fischer only half listened to her; he was focusing the better part of his attention on surreptitiously checking the rearview mirror on his side of the car.

And there he was, framed in the glass oval: the tall, shaggy-haired man in the long coat. Maybe twenty meters back. He stepped into view, suddenly, crossing from the opposite side of the street.

_Oh, my God—_

As if he could thus immobilize the man in his own reflection, Fischer kept his eyes locked on the mirror. But the fellow stepped out of sight, slipping either into a doorway or between the hotel and the building next to it. He _vanished_. Beside Fischer, almost nightmarishly calm, Susan was voicing some nonsense about old towels, books, a suitcase, about going out the back way—

"— and check the lot at the luggage claim at Paddington Station. Yes, I know you just got to bed. You're a love, Chris. Catch you later."

Fischer's eyes were still focused rearward. The shaggy man leaned slightly, momentarily, into view, from his tucked-away spot; Fischer's heartbeat seemed to impact on the reflection like a stone dropped into a pool when their eyes met —at this distance—? God, he had to be imagining it.— in the mirror. He half-stammered: "So now we go and retrieve… whatever it is?"

"No. Now, as I said, we're going shopping, and then you're treating me to an early lunch."

"But—"

He stopped when he saw where Susan was looking: her eyes were on the Mini's center mirror, and she was frowning, if mildly, at what she saw. She started the motor, continuing conversationally as she did: "That may be a very nice suit, but in a day or two you'll be looking like a derelict. We can get you some leisurewear. Maybe workout kit, too. You like to run, don't you?"

"Yes, but—"

"So do I. I'll show you the park tomorrow. It'll be fun."

"Susan, who _is_ he—? Who sent him—?"

"Shh. We'll find out soon enough." She overreached the gear shift, caught and squeezed his hand. "Relax, darling."

In delusion or in reality, Fischer knew, they'd become partners. Certainly, they'd become partners in a profoundly more intimate sense. Either way, or all three, he found it impossible to mistrust her. He did as he was told: as Susan miraculously extricated the black stump of a car from its impossibly small spot and swung them with a pilot's precision out into traffic, he settled back in the Mini's bucket seat, took his eyes from the rearview mirror, and willed the tension from his body and mind.

#####

#####

Given the retail mayhem that must have filled its premises on a Sunday two weekends before Christmas, Selfridges was, on Monday, almost eerily composed. Susan, performing another feat of parking that bordered on the telekinetic, found a spot for the Mini in the adjacent parking ramp; inside, the premises were thronged but not crowded with shoppers. Fischer, who'd had little experience in major retail settings less than a month before Christmas, found no cause for irritation, let alone for claustrophobia, panic, or— the shaggy-haired man by all appearances having lost the pursuit to Susan's and the Mini's combined skills of elusion— paranoia.

Nevertheless, she said, with a knowing smile, as they steered their way toward the men's department: "You've never gone Christmas shopping, have you?"

"No." Fischer smiled back at her, a little sheepishly, caught in yet another _never_. "I've always had assistants do it for me."

"All in all, for purposes of sanity, probably the wiser course."

#####

Wise or not, and given not only the idea that it wasn't exactly Christmas shopping but the fact that Fischer was very much enjoying the company he was keeping, they had fun. With her, he picked out jeans, trousers, three knit sweaters, sweatshirts, t-shirts, button-downs. Workout clothes. Lounge pants, briefs, socks. Running shoes, a pair of weather-sensible soft leather boots with good, grippy soles. A butter-soft gray suede winter jacket, a red-and-blue scarf, gloves. A jumble-knit hat in black and gray that Susan mischievously pulled onto his head and about which Fischer swore, laughing at his reflection in a column-mirror, he would never wear, not ever, no matter how bitterly the wind blew. They checked the resulting cluster of bags at customer service and returned to the first floor for lunch at Gordon's.

#####

As they were seated, by a young bob-haired brunette, clad in black slacks and a crisp white button-down shirt, whose extraordinarily petite frame seemed to embody a paradoxical meeting of "mouse" and "dynamite," Susan casually scanned their surroundings: the linen-and-polished-wood calm of the restaurant itself, the wide expanse of bustling retail space beyond. Fischer asked, as he unfolded his napkin:

"Is he here?"

"Not that I can see. If anything, he's probably in the car park, deciding whether it's worth his while, not to mention CCTV infamy, to break into the Mini." She curtailed her surveillance to smooth her own napkin onto her lap. "I'm half hoping he tries it. Chris has a TASER wired into the power locks."

Fischer looked at her incredulously. "You're kidding."

"No, I'm not. I made him stop at the ejector-seat idea, though. Would've completely buggered the sunroof."

"But it doesn't have a sunroof."

"Exactly." She offered him a cat-like smile to complement the sly purr of her voice. "And I'd like to keep it that way." She looked up, brightening her expression more conventionally, as a waiter approached. "Hello," she said.

The young man now tableside, who, like Mighty Mouse before him, was dressed trimly, his body not quite whippet-lean, in black and white, was a bit thrown by the reversal of script. But not irrecoverably so. He returned Susan's smile, democratically offered Fischer a smile, too, his face synchronous in its cheekbones and dimples, and said, in a voice slightly too deep for his build: "Welcome to Gordon's. Would you care for something from the bar?"

"Yes, please." Fischer spoke first. "The lady will have— May I—?" he asked Susan.

"Please do."

"The lady will have a mojito."

Susan kept her eyes on his. "And the gentleman will have a vodka-and-tonic."

The boy left them with menus as he went for their drinks.

#####

He feasted on a salad of grilled artichoke, tomato, feta, and arugula; she made eager work of a plate of chicken skewers with mint, cucumber, yogurt, and pita; they requested glasses of water, shared a plate of olives. Fischer said, as they ate:

"That photograph above your desk: your mother and sister?"

"Yes."

"You look a great deal alike."

He fell under the spell of her responding smile; he added, a little too quickly: "And your father—?"

Susan's face went oh-so-slightly still: already he was capable of noticing. "Pardon me," Fischer said. "I didn't mean to pry."

"It's alright." She reached for her water glass. "He left when I was nine and Sammi was six. I think he realized that an heir wasn't forthcoming. A son. Mum was keen on getting back to work full-time— she was, and is, a school teacher— and she didn't want to have any more children. So he left. I haven't seen him since."

Fischer sat back, feeling a chill of disbelief. "Because she wouldn't give him a son."

Susan looked at him levelly. "Do you have any brothers, Robert?"

"No."

"Any sisters?"

He reached for his vodka-and-tonic, paused with his glass at his lips. "No."

"Opposite problem, then, in your case. Siblings would only have complicated the rights of succession."

"You're right." Which didn't make the idea sting any less. Fischer took a long swallow of his drink. "What does your sister do?"

"She's in education, too. The brains of the family, actually: among other things, she teaches sixth-form calculus."

"Do they— Sammi, your mum— do they know what it is you do?"

"After a fashion. They think I'm in advertising. Same sort of thing, really, dream-tech and advertising: all about mental manipulation, isn't it?"

"But that's not where you started out."

"No." She slathered yogurt onto a bit of pita, topped it with a chunk of chicken, popped the whole thing into her mouth. She chewed thoroughly and thoughtfully, swallowed. "I think the RAF was my way of acknowledging that Dad wanted one of us to be a boy. My way of showing him, even if he wasn't there to see."

"So what happened? Why'd you leave it?"

"The 'tech. My co-pilot and I— my partner and I— were part of a program to test PASIV for RAF training purposes. He suffered a waking dream in the middle of a realtime flight: we crashed; he was killed. I was thereafter declared medically unfit to fly— I _was_, actually, for nearly two months— and granted an honorable discharge. Odd thing: I've never had a waking dream, not once, before or since."

The thought entered his mind unbidden and undesired; Fischer regarded it for a long moment, silently, before he asked: "Are you safe to drive...?"

"That's oddly phrased, Mr. Fischer." Susan took a sip of her mojito, regarded him coolly over the tabletop. "I mean, after last night... this morning... you ought to have _some_ idea, I should think."

Fischer's cheeks warmed, though not entirely unpleasantly. He had to make an effort not to sputter. He asked his salad plate: "I mean, should you be driving a car?"

"No. Absolutely not. You are in mortal peril every second we're on the road together."

Fischer, shocked, looked up. Susan looked back at him, her eyes sober, her face deathly still and serious. A moment passed. Her lips twitched. Finally, her expression split all-out into a grin.

The warmth spread all the way to Fischer's ears. He shook his head, grinned back at her. "You're a devil, you know that?"

#####

On the way to retrieve Fischer's purchases, they detoured into the wonders of the Food Hall. Fancy olive oils, for a treat, for Chris, in the hopes he'd put them to good use in the kitchen; cream filberts, or crystalline-sugar mothballs, for Nick's sweet tooth. Fischer, his belly full, the vodka-and-tonic now a contented buzz in his brain, hovered at the entrance to the confectionery while Susan completed her purchase. He looked around the hall; he looked at the shoppers, at the fantastical displays of goods; he looked, finally, up. Something shiny, green, and leafy was hanging maybe two meters above his head.

"That's mistletoe, isn't it?" he asked Susan, as she emerged.

She looked up, frowned in good-natured criticism. "I think it's plastic."

"It still counts, though, doesn't it?"

Before she could reply, he kissed her. She sighed, kissing him back— and for a second, the sounds fell away, the voices all around, the holiday music on the system overhead. They were alone, their lips touching tenderly, playfully; and Fischer could not recall a happier moment, not one, in his entire life.

Excusable, then, that he— and she, as Susan was equally caught up in the moment— should miss, above or below the roar of the crowd in the Food Hall, six soft, successive shutter-clicks.

Six rapid-fire winks of a camera's shiny black eye.

#####

When they returned to the car park, no shaggy-haired man lay electrocuted next to the Mini. Nor could they see him alive and lurking among the surrounding cars. Susan folded down the rear seats, and they filled the boot with bags; the Mini, internal transdimensionality seemingly another of its features, took the stuffing in stride.

"Alright, then," said Susan, once they'd ransomed their way out of the ramp and were heading home to Bloomsbury, "strategy time."

#####

#####

Later that afternoon, Nick and Fischer drove in the Mini to Paddington Station. Nick didn't park. Fischer entered the station alone, carrying with him the overnight bag he'd brought to The 41; he purchased a ticket for the Heathrow Express. Then he stopped at the left-luggage facility near Platform 12 and claimed a midsized black Samsonite suitcase.

He checked both his watch and the train time-tables, stepping away from the baggage counter, and frowned. He'd come up just short of the latest train to Heathrow. On top of that, he was feeling peckish. He drifted toward The Lawn, paused in the midst of a stream of people outside Caffe Ritazza to read the sandwich offerings.

Something hard jabbed itself into his back, high amid his right-side ribs.

As Fischer's spine went rigid, a man's voice said, quietly, over his right shoulder. "Don't turn around, Mr. Fischer." The accent was London-bred, working-class. Fischer didn't recognize the voice to which it belonged. "Just put the suitcase down and walk away."

"Do you want my overnight as well?" Fischer asked.

"Don't fuck about. You've got a train to catch."

Fischer did as he was told. He put down the suitcase and, without a sandwich, without looking back, walked back to the platform for the Heathrow Express. He boarded the next train just before the doors closed.

#####

Fifty-five minutes later, he was back at Paddington. He left the station with his overnight bag as the sun, weighted with rolls of pig-iron clouds, sank in the west. Nick was parked in the Mini two streets away.

"Did you get a look at him?" Fischer asked, getting into the passenger seat.

"Yeah. Big guy, stringy black hair, pedo trench coat." Nick rolled his eyes. "And thank _you_, station security, for seeing nothing suspicious, ever, at all. Right in the middle of the fucking food court, yet."

"That's the man Susan and I saw earlier."

"Gotta say, he gets around." Nick started the car. Before he put it in gear, he turned to Fischer and asked, with genuine concern: "Are you okay?"

"Yeah. Thanks, Nick."

"No problem." Nick nodded. He turned his attention to the road. "Let's go see how Chris and Sue made out."

#####

One hour and ten minutes earlier, Susan Gaumont and Chris Hanson strolled into Waterloo Station. She wore a fashionably styled golden-blonde wig and the sort of suit dress certain to keep anything with male-hetero eyes— or, indeed, with visual circuitry of practically any variety— focused on her long, lean legs; he was decked out in Oakley sunglasses and a perfectly tailored gray Armani suit, white pressed dress shirt, blue silk tie. "The Terminator by way of Tom Ford," Nick had said, seeing them off. At the left-baggage counter, Susan presented to the young male clerk, with a smile certain to forestall requests for photo identification, the claim ticket Fischer had found earlier in the breast pocket of his jacket. The clerk retrieved for them from the depths of the claim office's storeroom a midsized black Samsonite suitcase.

"Thanks so much," Susan said, increasing the wattage of her smile by an albedo or so for the clerk's benefit. She nodded toward the case. "If you please, Chris."

Chris took the suitcase. He and Susan left the station and drove in the Ford back to the house on Montague.

#####

"What if it's a bomb?" Nick said.

The four of them were standing around the basement dining table; the suitcase Susan and Chris had brought back from Waterloo Station stood at the table's center.

Chris snorted. "What if you're paranoid?"

"Just saying."

"I'll open it." Chris looked around the table. "Anyone care to leave the room?"

No one moved. Fischer looked at Susan, then tipped the suitcase on its side and unzipped and opened it. They all looked in.

Nick turned to Fischer. "You sure you only had the one bag? You _were_ pretty fucked up last night."

The case was filled with clothing, all in Fischer's size. A pair of black dress shoes that would fit him, too. Toiletries, a shaving kit. They spread everything out on the table. Chris examined the lining of the suitcase itself; Fischer watched as Nick unzipped the black nylon bag holding the shaver.

"Wait: no. That's wrong," he said, as Nick unsheathed a standard-issue black Norelco. Fischer reached for the charger. "That's not an Australian plug. It's American."

Nick nodded, turning the shaver in his hands. "And this: this has been cracked open and glued back together." He set the shaver down, sprinted upstairs, returned a moment later with a micro-tool kit. With the help of a flat-head screwdriver and a tiny plastic pry-wedge, he carefully split open the shaver's case.

Inside was a piece of silicon-and-circuit-board electronica, a black square roughly two inches to a side.

Nick removed it from the case, held it by its edges between his fingertips.

"That's a PASIV core," said Susan, leaning in for a closer look.

"It's different, though." Nick held the black block up to the light. "Something on the side there— see? Looks almost like some kind of receiver."

"For receiving what?" Chris asked.

"Don't know that yet, do we?"

"For receiving a signal of some sort, obviously," Susan said. "The question is, what kind of signal?"

"Great. PASIV Wi-Fi," Chris said. "What we've been waiting for."

"Chris, don't—" Susan began. She stopped. _What we've been waiting for—_

In a moment, a flash: Fischer incepted and helpless. Possibly damaged irrevocably as a consequence, certainly betrayed. Before that, years of frustration, of not knowing whether the training she and Nick and Chris provided in any way helped to keep their clients, Fischer included, safe from mental attack. And now, if this new device was what she hoped it was—

"We've been waiting to catch the bastards in the act," she said.

"The hell," Chris breathed out. "Holy shit. Who sent it?"

Susan's heart was pounding. "It must have been Miles."

"How do you know?" he asked.

"I just know. Waterloo Station," she added, when he continued, rightly so, to fix her with a querying scowl. "Or Waterloo Bridge, actually. That's where we met." She stopped short of saying that she'd been drunk and stoned out of her mind on painkillers at the time, and that Miles had literally pulled her pathetic suicidal self off the railing. Fortunately, Chris, leaning back from the table, crossing his arms against his chest, seemed satisfied.

Nick, it seemed, was slightly less so. "Why?"

Susan glanced at Fischer._ Atonement,_ she thought. "I'm not sure," she said aloud. "Nick, I need to ask you something."

He nodded, looking across at her. "I had access to Fischer's jacket last night."

"Did you—"

"— put the claim ticket in his pocket? No, Susan."

"I left a message for Miles earlier today; he hasn't called back."

"He hasn't been in touch with me, either."

"Fair enough."

"So, if we're done playing truth-or-dare," Chris said, "that leaves us with the new toy at hand."

"If it is what we think it is, we could use it to remote-access a PASIV device." Nick's tone held a hint of wonderment. "We could insert ourselves into another team's dreamscape."

Susan nodded. "And, by extension, we could establish that team's physical whereabouts."

"Hardjacking," Chris said. "Would it work both ways?"

Fischer looked from him to Susan. "Would what work both ways?"

"If we could find their bodies, then, theoretically, they could find ours."

"I think we need to start testing this thing," Nick said. "We can slot it into the B-machine."

#####

Two PASIV cases, dull silver metallic, like outsized briefcases, the first being Susan's team's primary dream-access device, the second, the aforementioned B-machine, possessed of a faulty processor core. Chris and Nick set the cases side-by-side on the matted floor of the basement workout area; Nick tethered himself to the B-machine with a wrist-anchored grounding strap, removed its core with a set of delicate Torx screwdrivers, and put the new core in its place. He tapped a small round button recessed in the machine's side: the button glowed green, and Fischer felt as much as heard the device emit a low hum.

Nick, packing away his screwdrivers, said: "Pay up, Chris."

He reached up and back, and Chris pressed a five-pound note into his palm. "Running bet," he said to Fischer. "Bastard always comes in at under three minutes on a prep-repair, and he never loses a screw."

Nick smiled as he pocketed the fiver and coiled his grounding strap. "I assume I'll be one of the ones going under. Care to join me, Sue?"

#####

He took the sofa; Susan took the floor. Fischer frowned, watching her unwrap a sterile fine-gauge needle, attach it to one of the B-machine's IV lines, and slip the angled razor tip beneath the skin of her left wrist.

"Doesn't that hurt?" he asked.

"They're very delicate needles." She offered him a reassuring smile. "You get used to it."

On the sofa, Nick was finishing his own prep. "Need any help with your base scenario, Sue?"

Cautious of her IV line, Susan lay back next to the B-machine. "Thanks, Nick: no. I'll be running Standard Cityscape. I should be able to handle that on my own."

"Good enough. Let's see—" Nick, lined to the team's primary PASIV device, stretched out on the sofa and looked thoughtfully up at the ceiling. "Chris, let's say fifteen minutes realtime. Sue: walk five blocks and take a left."

"Will do."

Fischer, kneeling by Susan's side, turned his disapproval to the bunking situation. Even through the mat, the floor was hard beneath his knees. "Are you comfortable?" he asked her.

She nodded up at him. "Nick prefers cushions. I feel more focused like this."

Nick looked to Chris. "Okay, big man, knock me out."

"You asked for it, you got it," Chris replied.

He pressed the center button, nearly the width of his fist, on the main console of the team's primary PASIV machine. Liquid the color of sage honey flowed out of the machine's core, pushed its way through the tube needled to Nick's wrist, and Nick, his gaze still focused ceilingward, closed his eyes. His body went limp against the cushions of the sofa.

It was disturbingly, disconcertingly quick. Fischer, watching, found himself shaking; he suddenly felt out of place, more than a bit helpless. In this mind he saw his mother exhaling her last breath, surrendering to stillness, as she lay in a hospital bed. He asked Susan: "Is this going to be dangerous?"

"It could be." She looked honestly, gently, into his fearful eyes; she nodded, then, toward the sofa. "Would you steal a pillow for me? Nick won't mind."

"Sure." He leaned over, took a pillow from the sofa, placed it under Susan's head.

"Ready, Sue?" Chris asked.

"On three, Chris." She knitted the fingers of her free hand with Fischer's, squeezed. He squeezed in return. "I'll be right back."

#####

"And: three," said Chris.

#####

_Two_.

#####

_One_.

#####

#####

Before Chris's voice had stopped resonating in her ears, before his countdown left her mind, Susan was walking: a sidewalk, the paving smooth and solid beneath the soles of her sensible business flats, in a city, any city, a multitude of cities unafraid to reach skyward. Standard Cityscape was Toronto, Minneapolis, Chicago, Manhattan, bits and pieces, a solid amalgam of North American concrete practicality. She wore a suit dress in matching masonry gray, and she moved at the brisk but casual pace of the businesspeople passing along the broad sidewalk. Nothing to be gained by going against the stream: the people around her might be her projections, elements of her subconscious, and the test she and Nick were to perform was to be brief, but there was no need to provoke unnecessary friction amongst the locals.

At the end of the first block, she crossed with the light, looking first to her left. North American rules of the road. Another block passed. Another two after that. Offices, restaurants. Mannequins gazing blankly out from storefront window displays. The sky was overcast but unthreatening; the temperature was pleasantly late-spring. She approached the fifth corner with anticipation but with an attitude of realism, too. Yes, certainly, Nick was a genius when it came to dreamscaping, and Susan, moving already within a dream, was certainly prone to the nonrules, open to the possibilities, the potentialities, and sheer power human imagination could wield in the realm of dreamtech. But she knew, too, that there were limits to what even someone like Nick could concoct on such short notice. Not to mention, their theory regarding the core now installed in the B-machine was apt to be completely wrong. When she turned the fifth corner, more likely than not she'd see nothing more than more of the same. More business-center skyscrapers. More concrete. More Standard Cityscape.

She reached the end of the fifth block, turned left, and stopped dead.

She was standing between two towering concrete grain silos at the edge of a small town. A prairie town in the American Midwest. It was high summer; a warm wind bore dust, the tang of silage. Susan turned and looked behind herself, and Standard Cityscape was right there, gray and overcast. The effect, to say the least, was jarring. When she turned back to face the prairie town, she felt almost a wave of exhilarated agoraphobia.

Which said effect was compounded by the sky above that prairie town. A high, wide-open sky. A sky cloudless and brilliantly blue. A sky the color of Robert Fischer's eyes.

"Nice, Nick," she said, smiling.

Before she stepped into the open, away from the silos, she mentally adjusted her clothing. Jeans, a short-sleeved white button-down polo, eight-eyelet Martens. Not far away, along the crowned two-lane highway leading into town, was an old-fashioned hamburger drive-in and a one-story motel. With high-grown corn rustling in the breeze to her right and left, Susan headed toward the drive-in. A big late-model Chevy and a Chrysler minivan were parked at menu-board ordering stations beneath the weathered rust-red metal shelter, plastic-and-metal trays hooked to lowered driver's-side windows; inside, a collective minor mob of mums and dads and kids were engaged in a contented feeding frenzy, paper-wrapped burgers, baskets of chips, sodas.

Nick, in jeans and a black t-shirt, sipping something through a straw from a green-and-white paper cup, was seated on top of a red picnic table to the right of the car park. He winked as Susan approached, tipped his head toward the motel. She took the hint, nodded, kept walking.

The Prairie Flower Motel. A yellow cinderblock bunker. At the westward end, an anchoring nub with a screen-door signed OFFICE. An old white-and-red Coke machine, its condenser chugging in the heat, standing on the sidewalk outside. And, half-shaded by an awning running the length of the building heading eastward, twelve equi-spaced doors. Susan strolled the concrete berm separating the building proper from its at-hand parking. No help there in determining which door she should try: the lot was empty. No chance of seeing inside, either: venetian blinds were slitted shut behind each of the building's dusty windows, one blind pane per door, per room.

The room numbers, then. One-oh-one, one-oh-two, et cetera, ascending. No need for the _one-ohs,_ not really, the motel having but one floor, but it was Nick's scenario, his dream.

When she got to one-oh-eight, she stopped.

If she were being British, and, being Manchester born and bred, she often was, she might think, if she were thinking dates, _ten-eight_. Ten of eight. The tenth of August. Nick, being American, would see it as Susan had first thought of the numbers, as _one-oh-eight_. One-eight. January eighth.

His birthday.

Susan took from her pocket a Leatherman multi-tool, a modest on-the-spot dream-up, and jimmied the door-handle lock. She opened the door six inches, said "Hello?" clearly, and, receiving no response, entered.

Two single beds, two moderately appalling green-and-yellow floral matched polyester coverlets. A chipped wood-veneer dresser, a round corner table, a sagging camel-colored mohair chair. A dusty cathode-ray Sony mounted to the wall facing the beds, an open door leading to the bathroom. A closet door set in the innermost wall, beside the bed farthest from the door.

Susan went to the closet, looked inside. A shelf at head height, empty. A clattering of wire hangers on a wooden cross-bar below. And, on the floor, its weight pressed into the dusty gold carpeting of the closet's left back corner, a small green metal safe. Susan knelt, examined the lock on its door, found nothing of high-security complication. With the help of the Leatherman, she had the safe open within forty-five seconds.

Inside she found, nestled in a crinkly pink paper cup, a single cream filbert. One of the sugar mothballs from Selfridges. As she reached into the safe, smiling, to pick it up, Nick spoke from behind her:

"Too bad it's nearly time to go."

Susan straightened, mothball in hand, turned. Nick, leaning casually into the room's doorframe, gestured with his green-and-white paper cup. "That drive-in makes a killer banana malt," he said.

"Maybe next time," she replied. Nick was right: already she could feel it. A tugging, almost, from behind, across her shoulders. She relaxed, not fighting it. "Good job, Nick. The potential here is really—"

#####

#####

"— incredible," Susan whispered, opening her eyes.

Fischer was right where she'd "left" him, still kneeling by her side. Susan swayed a bit, sitting up; he put a steadying arm around her shoulders. "Are you alright?" he asked.

She nodded as she drew the needle from her wrist. "I'm fine, I'm fine."

To the side, Nick, too, was a little shaky getting up. Chris took him by the arm as he stood. "You okay, man?"

"Yeah, I think."

"What did you see?" Fischer asked Susan.

"It worked," she said, smiling for him. Dreamily, appropriately enough. Maybe a bit wearily, too. "I was able to cross into Nick's dreamscape."

Chris asked, as he packed away the PASIV cases, slipped the used needles carefully into a small red biohazard box: "So what's next?"

"A more thorough examination of the device, for one." Nick reached for one of the cases.

Chris shook his head, possibly still seeing a shaking in Nick's muscles. "It's okay, man. I've got it."

He led the way upstairs. Nick followed. Susan, now on her feet, still seemed unsteady; though he in no way wished to seem patronizing, Fischer was concerned. He slipped an arm around her waist as they went up to the entryway of the house. Just short of the door to the workroom, she gently broke free of him.

"A more thorough examination," she repeated. "And then a field test. Against a live team. Real extractors."

She stood inside the workroom doorway and crossed her arms against her chest, watching Nick uncase the B-machine and its incredible new core on a corner of the workbench with lighting and equipment better suited to analysis. Fischer thought he heard her sigh. Then she said, "Robert, help me," and it was as if her right leg suddenly shortened.

He caught her as she collapsed.

#####

#####

#####


	5. Chapter 5

**A/N:** Well, this has been a learning experience. Two more chapters after this one, and then it's back to a focus on work-stuff and working out for yours truly. This one has turned into tough going: sorry, as ever and always, for the delays, and thanks for roughing it through with me. Oh, and— broad hint, maybe, here at the muddy end of a long winter— comments are sincerely welcome. Onward and upward, folks!

#####

#####

Fischer caught Susan as she collapsed, managed to get her into his arms before she hit the floor. Her head fell back limply; her eyes were closed. She was out, utterly out.

"Let's get her to her room," Chris said. "Here—"

He reached for Susan, and Fischer, his heart pounding with adrenaline and fear, snapped at him: "I have her."

"Okay, man. Okay."

He and Nick followed Fischer upstairs, down the narrow hallway to the room one short of the library; Fischer laid Susan carefully on her bed. She still showed no sign of coming to.

"Shouldn't we call a doctor?" he asked. "Get her to a hospital?"

"Try explaining in the E.R.," said Chris, "how your girlfriend passed out after hooking herself to an illegal dream-invasion machine and pumping herself full of semi-experimental narcotics."

Nick brushed past Fischer, seated himself beside Susan on the bed, took her wrist. "Her pulse is steady," he said. He felt her cheek, her forehead. "She's not cold and clammy. Not feverish." With a careful fingertip, he drew up her right eyelid. "Pupils are responsive." He looked up at Fischer. "When's the last time she ate?"

"Around noon."

Susan stirred, opened her eyes, looked around at their worried faces. "Dear God, you look like a roadshow cast of _The Wizard of Oz_."

"What happened, Sue?" Nick asked.

"I'm not sure."

He looked at her, his brows furrowing in thought. "What did you have to drink today?"

"A glass of water. A mojito—"

Nick winced, getting up. "Jesus, Sue, you didn't—"

"_O__ne_." She glared at him. "One drink, with lunch."

"You drank alcohol today? Before going under—?"

Chris placed a hand on Nick's shoulder. "You want to cut her some slack? She wasn't the only one looking like shit when you two woke up."

"If it's of interest," Susan said, "I am bloody hungry right now."

Fischer sat beside her. "Maybe that new device— maybe the process amps your metabolic rate."

"Could be," Chris said. "A dream on top of a dream. Like running two operating systems in your head at the same time. Maybe it triggers some kind of double-burn."

"Yeah. It's possible." Beside him, Nick seemed to sway slightly as he spoke. "I'm hungry, too."

Fischer looked at him with concern. "You're still looking shaky, Nick."

Chris stepped back from the bed. "Sounds like my cue to start dinner."

Susan started to get up; Fischer stopped her.

"No, Sue. Nuh-uh." Chris shook his head in gentle warning. "You take it easy for a while. Fischer, stay with her."

#####

Once Nick and Chris had left the room, there was no more need for her to look tough: her bones seemed to go out of her; she lay back again with a weary sigh. Fischer kicked off his boots and drew his stockinged feet up onto the bed, sat next to her with a pillow plumped between his back and the headboard. Susan laid her head against his torso, and he wrapped an arm protectively around her shoulders.

"Damn it," she said, her voice more than half-whisper, "if we go weak after every— if we can't even bloody well stay upright, it could— it could really curtail our ability to— to—" She stopped herself, looked up at him. Fischer was trying to keep his expression at least neutral; he felt himself failing. Susan frowned at the worry betrayed on his face. "I scared you, didn't I? I'm so sorry—"

He squeezed her. "Susan, shh..."

"It's just that I really want it to work; I do. It would mean so much for—"

Her voice trailed off. Fischer angled to see her face; her eyes were closed again. Her lips were parted slightly; her breathing was deep and steady. She lay against him as relaxed and trusting as a child. He held her while she slept.

#####

He woke with Nick sitting beside him, on the edge of the bed. Fischer, more embarrassed than anything for having fallen asleep, scowled at him. "Against house rules, isn't it, Nick?"

"I knocked; you didn't answer." Nick reached to smooth Susan's hair. "How is she?"

Susan absently swatted away his hand, snuggled closer to Fischer, and mumbled: "_She_ is fine, Nick. Hungry. Hungrier."

"Good thing supper's ready, then." He got up, called over his shoulder as he headed for the door: "Come on, Corpsezilla. Chris doesn't do room service; you know that."

He left them. Susan and Fischer reluctantly disentangled; as she stood, cautiously, and went to run a comb through her hair before the corner-basin mirror, Fischer sat at the bed's edge and reached for his boots.

#####

He went first down the twisty stairs, an unspoken caution, a just-in-case: he'd be there to stop Susan falling if she again felt weak.

She wasn't such a hardline feminist to protest the occasional, and definitely practical, chivalrous gesture. She was herself keeping a hand on the banister when she said to the back of Fischer's head: "You realize we'll be stuck with the dishes."

"I don't mind." Impulsively, he added, glancing over his shoulder at her: "I would do anything for you."

Susan paused to look at him, at the clarity of his wideset eyes, the openness in his ethereal face. "I think you would, at that." At the bottom of the stairs, one step above him, she placed a hand on his shoulder; Fischer turned to look up at her, and she leaned down and kissed his lips. He caressed her cheek, lingering the contact.

"Why don't you get a dishwasher?" he asked, as they passed the workroom.

Susan glanced in, made sure that Nick and Chris weren't there. "Because," she said, in a conspiratorial whisper, "our in-house tech-team would insist on installing it."

"But Nick is good with electronics."

"He and Chris are _great _with electronics. They are geniuses when it comes to computers. Anything impossibly tiny and delicate in the circuit department. Which doesn't in the least prevent them from being utter idiots when it comes to standard home appliances. Honest to God, Chris nearly electrocuted himself last week adjusting the settings on the toaster."

#####

Supper was, as Chris announced, one of Susan's favorites: potato pancakes, apple sauce, bangers for the meat-eaters. The four of them sat at the long table in the basement, talked as they ate.

"When we cross into another team's dreamscape, how long do you think we'll be able to stay concealed?" Nick asked.

"I don't know," Susan replied, reaching for the bowl of apple sauce. "I'm thinking that if we can mimic the behavior of the dreamer's projections, we'll be able to maintain a certain level of camouflage."

Chris added, for Fischer's benefit: "If we act like the drones, we should look like the drones. Both to the dreamer and to the other team."

"And then what?" Fischer asked.

Susan replied: "We disrupt the attack on the mark whilst analyzing said attack; eventually, we trace the other team to their physical location, restrain them, and notify the authorities."

Chris frowned. "You're talking police action."

"That's ultimately what Miles was planning."

"If it comes down to testifying in court, what evidence could we provide?" Nick asked.

"No: wait." A hard look from Chris. "How do you know that's what Miles was planning? He could have been using us, the defensive-training psych program, Fischer here, maybe even others. Who's to say this isn't a booby trap? A way of cleaning up loose ends? We go trespassing in the wrong dream, the signal from the hijacked machine gets cut off while we're under: we find ourselves trapped somehow in someone else's head. Who the hell can say? Even if he _was_ planning on us using this as a cop machine, like Nick said: what proof would we have? Legally? What could we take into court and say: 'Hey, these assholes were stealing stuff from people's minds'?"

"We'll rig some kind of recording," Nick replied.

Chris snorted as he reached for his coffee mug. "Right. Sure."

"We're already trespassing in people's dreams, Chris. _That's_ the impossible part; _that's _the sci-fi mumbo-jumbo bullshit. But it works, right? The new core can pick up signals; translating and recording those signals is the next logical step. Shit, man, even you know how to program a TiVo."

#####

#####

Days passed, one or two, three, four, strange but possibly the most content of Fischer's existence to date. Susan, Nick, and Chris welcomed him to the periphery of life with dream-tech and to their lives in general, all as their personal, intellectual, and emotional predilections allowed. Susan, as she'd offered, went running with him in a park mere blocks from the house; Nick showed him the swimming pool of a local, semi-private health club; Chris was ready with tips (and taunts and challenges) in the house's weight room. Fischer subjected— or treated— them to his favorite vegetarian lasagna recipe on his inaugural turn in the kitchen; later that night, he and Susan delved into the opening chapters of a leatherbound copy of the _Kama Sutra_ she'd found double-shelved behind a row of encyclopedias in the first-floor library.

Two days into his stay at the house, he realized he'd left Sydney without his phone.

Four seconds after that, he realized he didn't care.

The shaggy-haired man had apparently vanished. Fischer felt safe with Susan and with the others, safe enough not to cling to her or to them; they in turn wove him into their schedules, loosely but securely. He returned from a post-dinner swim to find Susan lying on the sofa in the basement entertainment area while spaceships screamed (through the airless star-spackled vacuum of space, no less and of course) across the wide screen of the television. She held a hand out to him, and he stretched out with her, plenty of room on the broad sectional for his lean frame and hers; he nestled his head in the crook between sofa cushion and throw pillow and asked, as Susan settled herself comfortably against him: "What are we watching?"

"If you say you've never seen _Star Wars,_ I may have to toss you out."

"That's the one— the one where the little gray spaceman wants Reese's Pieces, isn't it?"

Susan chuckled, dug a playful elbow into his ribs.

"Umm... the one where Richard Dreyfuss builds a Devil's Tower out of potato mash—?"

"—and then goes shark-hunting with Robert Shaw in outer space: yes, that one."

She wasn't completely content, though, he knew: Miles had yet to return not only her first call but a second one. And while Nick, with the help of the workroom CPUs and with dream- and fieldwork on the part of the others, was creating an ever-more-detailed portrait of the new PASIV core (which Chris, fittingly enough, had nicknamed "AGRESIV": even though they had yet to fit words to the first half of the acronym, the sound of the whole was very satisfying), the fact remained that they were working, in a manner of speaking, to write their own owner's manual for the damned thing. Their initial tests failed to find the limit of its range: Chris and Susan had driven the team's PASIV machine all the way to Oxford, where Susan wired Chris into a standard dreamscape in the privacy of a hotel room; and Nick had received its signal back in London, through AGRESIV, nearly as clearly as he would if the machines were in the same room.

#####

The reverse-read capabilities of the mystery core were equally hard to measure. During the first tests, they split the team: two on PASIV, two tracking them using AGRESIV. The problem was the four of them were too familiar with each other's dream- and thought-patterns, too comfortable, if not, in certain ways, even interchangeable, with their subconsciousnesses to target, repulse, or neutralize any truly foreign elements that might be moving among them. In brief, their minds had learned to accept each other's projections. They couldn't be exactly certain how quickly a rival team would recognize them as interlopers within a dream, or with what degree of accuracy, short of straight face-to-face identification, that team could back-trace them.

Part of the problem, too, was the novel after-effects that AGRESIV provoked. For all their efforts to stay hydrated, to eat nutritionally dense foods, using the machine was a physically draining experience. And there was another difficulty: the first interloping dreamer, the one whose dream was to be the bridge into the PASIV user's dreamscape, was apt to experience, at least temporarily, waking dreams after the session terminated.

Susan was the first to find this out. In the attic of the house, with Chris monitoring him, Nick, stretched out on a camp cot beneath the rough dusty beams of the ceiling, went under using the PASIV machine.

_Go, Sue, _said the walkie on the nightstand in Fischer's room, one minute later.

Fischer was with her, but not tubed; she nodded to him, lying back on his bed, a concession to his concern if not to her own sense of comfort, her left wrist IVed to AGRESIV, and he put her under.

#####

She was in an art gallery. The Louvre by way of Warhol. A modern wing with eighteenth-century paned windows, white walls, paintings hung on ten-foot-high kiosks. Brilliant colors, bold lines. A floorplan like a maze.

Nick's mind at play.

Susan moved casually through the room, eyeing the art, the projections passing as fellow patrons. When she spotted Nick, standing near one of the room's windows, she froze. Stepped to the right, behind one of the display-blocks, just a second too late.

He'd spotted her, too.

"Gig's up, Sue!" he called— and threw himself, in a crash, in a glittering outburst of glass, through the window.

"Damn it," she breathed. The thing was, the point of this particular dream-run was to gauge what would happen if the PASIV dreamer kicked free of the scenario while the AGRESIV dreamer and that dreamer's team were still present in said scenario. Sue was currently the lab subject of two particular questions: Would the AGRESIV team be able to self-kick, too, once the dream had, for practical purposes, ended? And would the PASIV dreamer's projections still be actively engaged with the scenario, and any potential interlopers, once the PASIV dreamer awoke?

The answer to the second question presented itself first. The other gallery patrons, the projections, turned on Susan in unison, targeted her, and charged.

"Shit," she heard herself say. "Shit, shit, shit—"

She dodged the first of them, a young couple, boy and girl, gothlike in black. A middle-aged man caught her arm in a beefy hand; she let his pull boost her momentum toward him, slugged him in the jaw, twisted away between two women who managed to collide with each other when they missed her. She couldn't reach Nick's window, or any of the others, but there was an emergency exit less than six meters away. She sprinted for it as fingers raked her back, clutched at the sleeves of her sweater; she hit the cross-bar of the door at a dead run, pushed her way through—

— and threw herself, with a final panting "—_shit_—!", down the run of stairs on the other side.

#####

She was airborne, watching between heartbeats as the cinderblock wall at the back of the stairwell below came into sharp and immediate focus—

#####

Then she woke up.

And, for just a moment, what she had feared would happen did: she _was _where she'd _been_, still in Nick's dream, in the gallery. The projections were gone, but the room, the kiosks, and pictures were there, semi-opaque, overlaid on Fischer's bedroom. Susan sat cautiously up, looked down at herself. Just one of her, dressed as she'd been before she went under, in jeans and a blue RAF sweatshirt.

Fischer sat beside her. "Are you alright, Susan?"

She stared through a painting to see him. Bursts of primary colors like faded stained glass, a scrim before his face. She focused on his eyes.

"Sit still for a moment, would you, Robert? Please."

She reached for him, touched him. Traced his left cheekbone with her fingertips. The gallery faded, was gone.

"We have a minor problem," she said, softly.

#####

"That could be a real risk," Nick said, once he and Chris came down from the attic to join them, "if we have to make any quick real-world getaways."

"We may have to look in to hiring outside muscle," Susan said. "Someone to watch over us while we're under."

Chris nodded. "No problem. I have a couple of people in mind here in London. I'll find out if they're available."

#####

In the meantime, in the next few days, he focused on the more physical aspects of their AGRESIV training. He kept them stocked up on vitamins, protein powder, energy drinks, and meal-replacement shakes, to counter the weakness they felt upon waking. And, while Susan and Nick concentrated on the more subtle aspects of hardjacking, he trained Fischer.

They worked out in realtime and in the PASIV machine's dreamscape. "How you handle yourself physically in realtime bleeds across into dreamside," Chris told him. "This isn't _The_ _Matrix_. You're not just suddenly gonna know kung-fu. We can't package-drop data into your head."

He said this while he and Fischer were in the workout area in the basement of the house. The two of them were in sweats and t-shirts; Chris had pushed back the dining table, put down additional mats, and pulled the kickboxing dummy from its place in the corner. Fischer enjoyed swimming and running; he'd done enough weight-work to keep himself physically toned and mentally sharp. He knew standard self-defense maneuvers.

But, until now, he'd confined his but-occasional acts of aggression to the boardroom. And none of said aggressive acts had involved punching, kicking, or an opponent roughly one third bigger than he was, let alone one for whom Fischer still harbored vestiges of primal, dream-based fear.

Chris, of course, sensed it. "Are you afraid of me?" he asked Fischer, bluntly.

Fischer replied, just as frankly: "Yes."

"Makes sense. In Sydney, I beat you up. I scared you. You thought I hurt Sue. Plain fact of the matter is I grew up in a rough neighborhood; I've done jail time. Physically, I've got maybe five inches on you, at least thirty pounds. But you know what? Some of the meanest, sneakiest bastards I've ever met were your size. I've got strength; you'll have speed. Use it."

To his credit, Fischer made a sincere, even visceral, effort. In realtime, Chris taught him fighting that was practical, not fancy. How to keep his balance, how to focus his punches, how to throw effective kicks. Nothing that would be fodder for a training montage in a movie, nothing exotic. Fischer learned, too, how to take a hit, how to keep his breathing steady when adrenaline threatened to choke the oxygen from his blood, when his heart and brain told him to turn tail and run. While Chris had him in terms of weight and reach, what he'd said was true: Fischer had speed, and agility, too, and he had a knack for removing himself from the fray mentally, from pain and breathlessness, while his fists and feet, elbows and knees, found _ins_.

Where he found the going more difficult was, ironically, on dreamside. Chris ran a training program that mimicked the weight room without replicating it (a fear of exact replication being, Fischer noted, one of the most universal superstitions of his dream-tech acquaintances), while adding a bit more space; and there, drugged, dreaming, _under_, Fischer found himself on the receiving end of beating after beating. In dreamtime, Chris seemed to move more quickly, to hit harder, to dodge blows that Fischer would have landed solidly up top.

Chris said, panting but unfazed, after Fischer chuffed a right cross off his dream-body chest: "Amp your muscle mass." He smacked the side of Fischer's head. "Don't think about it, you little weasel. Just do it." Fischer responded with an angry but weightless left; Chris knocked it effortlessly aside. "When you shot me, in Sydney, in that dream, you weren't thinking about it, were you?"

Said dream came back to Fischer on a wave of adrenaline, a sinking in the stomach. He hadn't, at the time, realized he was dreaming: he'd tried to take Susan away from a flat in which she been, ostensibly, Chris's emotional if not physical captive; Chris had caught them "escaping"; he'd stabbed Fischer fatally.

At which point, in that dream a year or so ago, Fischer had produced— with more panicked, dying conjecture than actual knowing— a snub-nosed thirty-eight (not unlike the gun he'd felt compelled to find and bring with him to London, nearly three weeks ago, in realtime: the connection, the implication, he'd never noticed until now) and shot Chris, dream-based monster-Chris, through the eye.

Fischer replied now, from behind his guarding fists: "No. I was _feeling_ it."

For the moment, Chris wasn't pressing his attack. He stepped back, gave Fischer room. "Protectiveness for Sue, hatred for me: right?"

"Yeah."

"Fine. Do the same thing now. Check your super-ego at the door, and turn your id loose. What Sue or Miles would call 'a clear visualization fueled by an emotive response to the dreamscape.'"

"A what?"

"Picture me flat on my ass, and then use anger, hatred, whatever, to put me there."

Fischer tried. But he couldn't do it. Couldn't get his dream-self and his aggression to work in synch. Chris, to his credit, tried to be patient; his own aggression, likely fueled at the level of animal subconsciousness by Fischer's ineptitude, eventually prevailed. He advanced on Fischer with his longer reach, his dream-time experience, his natural skill as a fighter, and proceeded to hand the smaller man an almighty beating.

Fischer, buckling, cringing, trying to block the hail of blows, whispered as if in a nightmare, finally shouted: "Stop hitting me. Stop it. Stop—!"

Chris broke off, gave Fischer room in which to double over and stumble. "Man, I can only take this so far." He wiped sweat from his face, tried to breathe civility back into his voice. "Didn't the followup team teach you anything?"

Fischer, gasping, glared up at him. "What followup team?"

"In Sydney. After Nick and Sue and I left. The ones who taught you the nitty-gritty stuff. Honestly, I thought what we were doing here was review."

"There wasn't— there wasn't anyone after you."

"You're kidding. You're fucking kidding."

Fischer wiped blood from a cut at the corner of his mouth. "No."

"Oh, shit." Chris was openly incredulous. And, if Fischer were any judge, of people in general and of people who'd just beaten him bloody in a dream in particular, as close as he would ever come to stunned apology. "Oh, man, I'm sorry."

They kicked out of the training scenario, the kick itself, the trip-and-fall, seeming redundant to Fischer given the pounding that preceded it. Chris, still contrite, made him a top-line fruit-and-veggie smoothie, sprinkled protein powder into orange juice for himself; they talked while they stretched the fight, dreamside and real, from their limbs.

"Basically, there are thee different types of dream-side transformation," Chris said. "We tried for the first one just now: personal physicality. Minor adjustments to your corpus within the dream. The second one is full physical morph, or transformation. There are guys— well, gals, too, but it seems like it's the guys who really get off on it— who specialize in it. They call themselves forgers. Sue said she spoke to Eames on your behalf; he's one of those. The third type of transformation involves clothing and equipment. You need the right look to blend in, you need a piece of hardware: you dream it up."

"Clothing and equipment: that's transforming the dreamscape itself, isn't it?" Fischer frowned thoughtfully as he broke off a shoulder-stretch to reach for his drink. "Or is it a way of transforming the collective perception of the dreamscape? And is everyone in the dreamscape susceptible to that perception?"

"You're talking like a guy who just took a few too many shots to the jaw." Chris shook his head. "Whatever the source, however it works, the thing to keep in mind is this: the larger the change, the more apt the dreamer's projections are to spot it. Make too big of a mess, and eventually, theoretically, before someone pulls the plug on the dreamscape, all bets are off: anything goes. Hell," he added, with a sly smile, "we might get a chance to test that on a rival team."

#####

Later, more soberly, he informed Susan of the latest jarring fact of Fischer's situation: that they'd been his only trainers, that there'd been, for him, no fine-tuning team in Sydney. That night, she quietly left another message for Miles.

Miles didn't return that call, either.

#####

#####

A day later, all doubts aside, despite calls unreturned, they were, as a group, ready enough, restless enough, or curious enough about AGRESIV to want a true test of the new machine: against another dream-tech team.

"Who's our guardian gonna be?" Nick asked.

The four of them were gathered, standing or sitting, in the workroom. Chris had yet to hear back from his prime choice for physical security, a woman by the name of Laemmle.

"Robert," Susan replied.

Chris snorted. "Pardon me, but I'm not about to trust my physical well-being to someone who doesn't know the tech or the drugs, let alone to a guy who's been professionally brainjacked." He glanced sidewise at Fischer. "No offense."

"At least you didn't call me a seven-stone weakling," Fischer muttered, drolly.

"Who, then?" Susan asked.

"Me," Chris replied. "I'll do it."

"Which means we'll be short-handed on dreamside," Nick said. "Even if Robert tags along."

"Carroll's team is still in Geneva." Chris looked to Susan. "Who can we get on such short notice?"

For a moment, Susan was silent. "Well, he _is_ in town—" she said.

"No," Chris growled. "Don't even think it."

"Who?" Fischer asked.

"Eames, you dope." Chris didn't take his eyes off of Susan. "We can't let him know about this tech, Sue."

"If he doesn't already know, he'll find out soon enough."

"Or think of it this way," Nick offered. "We'll be hiding it right under his nose."

"And that asshole will sniff it right out and sell it out from under us."

"Redolently phrased, Mr. Hanson," murmured Nick.

"We'll use this as a demo run." Susan's expression was thoughtful. "We won't do anything this time but observe. Stay still, blend in. Take notes. See how long we can go unnoticed. If it works, we'll try a second run, complete with disruption. In essence, we'll hijack an extraction. He'll love that."

Chris was openly sarcastic. "Well, as long as he's happy."

"He could still say no," Nick said. "Especially when he realizes there's definite real-world danger."

A dust-dry chuckle, a knowing smile, from Susan. "Not that libertine."

"He'll have to live here, you know," Nick added.

A general stiffening of shoulders and backs. An uncomfortable shared pause. "Why?" Chris asked.

"Obvious, isn't it?" When Chris's expression remained too stonily obtuse, Nick continued: "We'll have to be on firehouse alert here. We can't know when AGRESIV will pick up the signal from another PASIV device. When it does, we'll have to be ready to go on a moment's notice."

#####

#####

At a local pub, an old place, historic, beautifully restored, somewhere a young business tycoon might casually meet with a prospective contractor to discuss a job, however fantastical, they encountered the man called Eames. He came on Susan's invitation; he preceded them. "Ah, you brought the romantic interests," he said, in the smugly casual, too-rough-for-first-class accent Fischer remembered, his sloe-eyed gaze sliding from Susan to Nick. Fischer heard the plural, as, he knew, he was meant to; he bristled. It was as if he knew and disliked Eames at a molecular level. A mistrust resulting from a violation he detested without being able to recall, consciously, in detail.

The place at midweek was less than packed; the four of them found seating at a table in a cubicle with walls of frosted glass. "But not the muscle," Eames added, making a show of looking about for Chris. "Trying for subtlety, are we?"

They ordered. Susan and Fischer, like Eames, opted for pints of the house lager. Nick ordered red wine. The place had a decent cellar. "Would you mind if I got something to eat?" Eames asked. "Afraid you tore me away from my breakfast."

Fischer glanced at his watch. It was nearly eight p.m. "Anything you like," he said.

Eames looked at him very directly, a twinkle in his deep-sea eyes. "You don't say."

"We _are _here to negotiate, aren't we, Mr. Eames?"

"To negotiate _what_, though: that remains to be seen." Eames turned to Nick. "Has naughty Susan been keeping Mr. Fischer all to herself?"

"Yes, she has."

"Poor boy," Eames murmured. A moment later, as if by magic, he had before him a massive beef sandwich, a huge basket of chips, which he nudged Nick's way, and from which Nick, seemingly amiably, fed. An amiability Fischer didn't like one bit. _But necessary,_ he told himself. He'd witnessed the tawdrier side of business dealings before. _All part of the process._

Eames washed down a mouthful of sandwich with a long draught of his pint. "Now, about this job—"

"Jobs," Fischer corrected him. "One of several." He took a pen and a small notebook from the breast pocket of his jacket, wrote a figure. He tore out the page and slid it across the table.

Eames drew the paper nearer, looked at the number; his lips pursed momentarily, as if in a silent whistle. "Define 'several.'"

"Two, definitely," Susan said. "Possibly more."

"Your retainer to be re-negotiated as needed," Fischer added.

"Mr. Fischer," said Eames, smiling as he looked up from the paper, "I'm all yours."

#####

Fortunately, once Eames became their housemate, they hadn't long to wait. Not that night, but very early on the morning following the night after that, AGRESIV picked up a signal from a foreign PASIV device.

When the new machine commenced its quiet but insistent beeping, just after one a.m., Susan and Fischer were upstairs, cuddled in bed beneath the sleet-spattered window of the room he now called his. In the workroom, Eames and Nick were playing a gay-porn hack of World of Warcraft. Downstairs, Chris dozed on the sofa while _Under Siege _blared on the TV. They roused themselves, rose, dressed as necessary; in the basement, in the rec area, they congregated around AGRESIV.

#####

For purposes of this first run, Fischer and Eames were to be casual observers and, as needed, minor distractions for the unknown PASIV dreamer's projections. Susan was their leader; normally Chris would be her point-man, but today Nick would be doubling as point-man and architect. He and Susan were going to see how far they could tail their dream-rivals, especially the extractor or extractors among those rivals, without being noticed.

"Watch for people moving out of synch with the others," she said, mainly, Fischer knew, for his benefit. "They're the other team."

Hers would be their entry-dream. "She just loves the idea of having all of us handsome devils poking around in her skull," Eames said, leaning languidly back, already tubed to AGRESIV, on one end of the sofa. Fischer, keeping his eyes on Susan as she gently slid an IV needle beneath the skin of his left wrist, fought an urge to lean across and punch him. Tubed, he lay back on the mats, tried to relax. Susan tubed herself, then lay down beside him.

Just before he went under, Fischer felt her hand touch his.

#####

Nick, as architect, went in first, to create a bridging area, an interface, between their dreamscape and that of the other team. A quiet spot, out of the way.

#####

Which was embodied, literally, as a waiting room. Fischer, coming to in Susan's dreamscape, found himself seated beside her on a latte-colored sofa. Generic pastel landscapes hung framed on the walls. A spread of bland magazines lay on the coffee table three feet from their knees. Tetras and angelfish finned their way among the aerator bubbles of a wall-mounted aquarium, next to a generic wood-grain door that led, as logic might dictate, deeper into the "clinic": a door to the dream into which they intended to cross. Fischer, having been instructed to wear something unobtrusive but— by his standards— comfortable, was in a decent charcoal-colored suit, white shirt, lighter gray tie, comfortable shoes. Susan wore a gray suit-dress and practical business flats; her hair was swept up tidily on top of her head.

Across the way, Eames, holding an issue of _McCall's _in a manner that suggested he had a copy of _Penthouse_ concealed between its pages, looked across at him. He wore a camel-colored sports jacket and slacks, a midnight-blue button-down shirt open at the throat. "All that's missing is the whine of the dentist's drill, eh?"

He smirked as Fischer was unable to forestall a nervous flinch; Susan checked her watch.

"Okay," she said. "It's time."

Three minutes, Nick had said. Three minutes for him to establish a bridge between Susan's dream and the dream being channeled through the rival, unknown team's PASIV device. All conjecture, of course. And no way for them to know if he'd succeeded until they actually—

There was a knock at the door leading out of the waiting room. A pattern of taps: _Long-short. Short-short. Long-short-long_.

Susan got up, opened the door. Nick stood there, his hair combed back, business-casual in a blue shirt, a silk tie in purple and black Windsor-knotted at his throat, a dark knit-blend suit-jacket draped over his right arm.

"You can't spell your own bloody name?" Eames said, closing his magazine and standing up. "You're missing a 'c,' darling."

"Maybe I'm saving it for later." Nick looked from him to Susan. "We're good; we're in. It's a garden party. Summertime."

He stepped aside to allow them to pass through. Susan went first. Eames was next.

"And so we drop from the sky and land in Oz," he said. In the doorway he paused, turned to wink at Fischer. "Our boy from Sydney should feel right at home."

#####

#####

#####


	6. Chapter 6

**A/N: **One-more-and-done! Stay sharp: things are heating up. And, as always, thanks for tagging along.

#####

#####

Sheep-in-need-of-shearing clouds wandered a glorious blue sky. The sun was angled at approximately three p.m., midway through a midsummer English day. Behind them, the waiting-room door, now closed, had become the weathered-gray door of a garden shed. Fischer followed the others between tidy rectangular plots of daffodils and snapdragons toward the sounds of a party. They passed in loose pairs, first Susan and Nick, then Eames and Fischer (bunching up, as a group, being a thing that might give them away to the rival team), through a break in the tall hedgerows roughly seven meters from the lip of the wide concrete decking at the foot of a swimming pool, its sparkling water catching and casting back the blue of the sky. Men and women, summer-casual, wandered and mingled, drinks in hand. A five-piece group in white shirts and black vests, armed with a tenor sax, guitars, an upright bass, and a drum kit, passed tasteful jazz to the breeze.

Ahead, beyond the pool, a wide balustraded patio led back to the near wing of a rich man's country home. Nearer, slightly, stood the rich man himself, or it had to be. He was short, burly, barrel-chested, even, in a light blue suit. The sunlight glinted off his cropped gray hair. His broad face was genial; he was sharing a laugh with one of the partygoers.

Fischer slowed. "Wait," he said to Eames. "That's the mark, isn't it?"

"Could be, yes."

"I know him."

"Susan," Eames said, quietly.

He and she co-paused, taking in unison champagne flutes from the tray of a passing waiter.

"What is it?" she asked, smiling coolly for the benefit of the pool.

Fischer came near, his hands casual in his trouser pockets. He tried to smile as Susan smiled, tried to look like he belonged at an imaginary party in another man's synthetic dream; he said: "His name is Richard Selkirk. He and my father were friends. I was in his son's wedding party six months ago. He knows me; he'll recognize me."

Susan nodded, sipped her champagne. "You could be implicated if he remembers any of this."

"Should I cancel out?"

"No. Not necessary. Eames—"

"Yes, love?"

Fischer flinched at the endearment, the silkiness with which Eames uttered it. _Bastard_. Susan said: "Mr. Fischer needs a disguise." She let her arm brush Fischer's as she turned from the pool; for a second her smile was for him alone. "You'll be fine," she said. She took her drink and moved away, following Nick toward the house.

Eames drew Fischer away from the pool, back into the garden. He found them a secluded spot between hedgerows, glanced about. They were alone. "Close your eyes," he said to Fischer. "Come on, now. Relax."

Fischer managed one without exactly achieving the other. He closed his eyes and, in the presence of a man he considered at least half an enemy and wholly not to be trusted, tried to breathe deeply, to will the tension from his shoulders.

"Good enough," said Eames. Fischer sensed him moving closer; when Eames spoke again, softly, his voice sounded mere inches from Fischer's ear. "Now imagine the most beautiful woman in the world."

Fischer had kept company, socially, intimately, with any number of lovely ladies. He had, of course, seen the made-up, Photoshopped epitomes of feminine beauty onscreen and in print. Now, immediately and exclusively, he thought of how Susan's eyes, intently, intelligently blue, were slightly misaligned. He thought of the playful crookedness of her smile, the odd, and oddly endearing, cleft in her chin. With his own eyes still closed, he found himself nearly smiling at the smile he saw in his mind.

Then he felt a weightiness in his chest. His brows drew together in a frown; he looked. His suit and dress shirt and tie had gone; he was wearing something in pale lavender. And more than that:

"I have breasts," he said.

Eames seemed to be trapped between fascination and a smirk. "Mm hm."

Fischer scowled at him. "I'm not sure if I approve—"

He stopped. His voice was higher, too. More feminine

"Here." Atop a concrete birdbath in a break in the shrubbery to their left sat a silver mirror-ball. Eames took him by the shoulders, turned him to face it.

Fischer gasped.

He was a woman. Young, petite. Eyes blue and wide-set, a face delicately featured. Deep brown hair, shoulder-length, glossy, loosely tied back. He might have been Susan's sister. He might have been his _own_ sister.

Eames patted his shoulder encouragingly. "They're _lovely_ tits. Modeled on Susan's, obviously. You must appreciate that. And that frock is positively fetching."

Fischer tried not to wonder where he might have seen the modestly cut sundress he— _she?_— was wearing. No: he must have noticed it at Selfridges. When he and Susan were out, together, a perpetual tingle in his nethers at the very nearness of her, he'd been subconsciously shopping for women's clothing. He choked back the implication to demand: "When did you see Susan's breasts?"

"Well, uh— In general. They're modeled generally on Susan's. Which are, you must admit, lovely."

A clamminess crept across Fischer's forehead. He swallowed. He reached down, as cautiously and surreptitiously as he could (pointless, that: a bomb might have gone off behind them, and Eames wouldn't have looked away), and patted his groin. Sick fear collided with horrified realization: something— _something_— was missing. It might not have been much, but it had been his, it was part of _him_, and now it was gone.

The clamminess turned to cold sweat. "I think I'm going to throw up," he said.

"No. No, you're not." Eames gave Fischer what he thought must pass for a reassuring smile (the same sort of smile, Fischer imagined, that a shark might offer a grouper:_ I guarantee you, dear dinner, it will all be over soon._), and walked away, back toward the party. Fischer, despite his nausea and better inclinations, followed. "If you vomit in a dream, you vomit up top."

"You're joking."

They had once again left the hedgerows and were strolling along the long axis of the pool, Eames looking maddeningly relaxed but moving, possibly to his credit, slowly enough so that Fischer could get the hang of walking in the low gray pumps he now wore.

"Not at all. You'll wake up covered in sick. If you don't choke on it. My advice: keep it down." They'd come to the patio-edge of the pool. Among the minglers, Nick and Susan were nowhere in sight. Eames's face went still as he looked over Fischer's shoulder. "Oh, bloody hell—"

"What—?"

"Relax, darling. Just go with it."

"I don't understand—"

Behind him, a man's voice said: "Can I help you?"

Fischer turned. It was the mark. Richard Selkirk. He looked at Fischer, his eyes as wise, witty, and blue as Fischer remembered.

"I, umm—" While his entire transmogrified being flooded with dread, Fischer found himself trying a shy smile. "I'm feeling a bit lost."

"You're _looking_ a bit lost. Are you alright?"

"Too much sun, I'm afraid."

"Ah. Let's get you inside for a moment, then, shall we?"

The concern on Selkirk's broad face was genuine. Nothing lascivious or calculating about it. Fischer remembered hearing, years ago, Peter Browning, his uncle and godfather, Fischer-Morrow's chief of accounting, wonder aloud, well away from Fischer's father's hearing, how someone as sincere as Selkirk had gotten as far as he had in business, let alone how Maurice, the great, cold calculator, could be friends with someone so disingenuous. Browning's phrasing had, of course, been slightly more profane. Now, in a dream, Selkirk gently drew Fischer toward shelter.

Eames, for his part, was hanging back. Not just, Fischer realized, out of deference to whatever dream-driven thoughts of chivalry Richard Selkirk might be pursuing, but because two men had separated themselves from the party at large and were following Fischer and his erstwhile protector toward the house.

The two of them wore spotless linen suits that might have been tailored in Graham Greene's Panama. The first man, fortyish, dark-haired, neatly bearded, hung back slightly as the second man approached. He was of average height, a bit younger-looking than the first, trim, arrogantly handsome. Wheat-gold hair swept back, in casual retreat, off his high forehead. He ignored Fischer; he fixed Selkirk with Mediterranean-blue eyes and a smile that could sell a Rolls or a Cessna to the not-quite-decided, and said, in a refined and reassuring British accent: "Ah, Mr. Selkirk. Might we have a moment? We're here to provide you the security code for your new safe."

Fischer went still while his heart tried to beat its way out of his chest.

It was the other team's extractor. It had to be.

He kept his expression neutral, his eyes on a mid-distance— on the party, actually, where Eames was now casually drifting near the pool, longstemmed drink in hand, and Susan and Nick, from Fischer's vantage-point, anyway, were nowhere to be seen— as the second man gave him a brief but probing stare. The first man's expression was friendlier. Appreciative, even. Fischer, willing himself not to blush, didn't know which of the two looks he found more disturbing.

"Of course, gentlemen. Please come in." Selkirk kept his hand lightly on Fischer's arm, continued to draw him (or _her_: at this point, Fischer's thoughts, like his heart, were threatening to thrash clean out of his body) along as they crossed the flagstone patio to the French doors leading into the house.

The man who had to be the extractor caught Selkirk's eye, nodded Fischer's way, and discreetly cleared his throat.

"My secretary," Selkirk said, smiling, by way of explanation. As he opened the door for Fischer, he gave him a _don't-worry_ wink. His eyes, though, Fischer noted, were slightly dreamy, slightly sad. "She's been a bit_ too much i' the sun,_ poor dear."

Man one and man two exchanged a look; man one, the darker fellow, shrugged. They followed Selkirk and Fischer inside.

#####

And so it was that Fischer saw everything.

The four of them proceeded through a perfectly furnished country-home parlor, all sunshine, good solid wood, and woodsy pastels, to a ground-floor study. Selkirk, the gentleman, guided Fischer to a cushioned chair to the right of a massive oak desk; Fischer then watched, peripherally, shaking, the two men watch Selkirk open, at just above chest-level, like the cover of a book, a half-meter square of the oak paneling to the right of and behind the desk, revealing the metal dial-locked door of a safe.

"When we installed the safe, Mr. Selkirk," said the darker man, in a polite but distinctly Californian accent (Fischer, once upon a time, when he'd been a boy, had had a Californian mother, now long and tragically dead: he could hear San Diego in the dream-man's voice as clearly as he'd heard it in his childhood), "we neglected to give you the combination. Of course you know that's for your own safety; we wanted to wait until we could see you in person. Now, here's the code—"

He offered Selkirk a slip of paper. Selkirk shook his head, not taking it.

"Sorry, gentlemen, but I have my own combination in mind." He looked from man one to man two, the extractor; he smiled. "I enter it once; the system locks it in, correct?"

The extractor's voice betrayed the slightest of tremors. "Of course."

He watched, the other man watched, Fischer, cautiously, watched as Selkirk dialed in _01 02 67_.

Fischer didn't know how he should know it, but he did: a memory, a bit of quote from a first-year humanities requirement having nothing to do with his chemical-engineering major. "Not so, my lord; I am too much i' the sun." _Hamlet,_ act 1, scene 2. Line sixty-seven. _01 02 67._ A thought, transformed into numbers, bleeding from his head to Selkirk's and back again.

Or vice-versa. The dream had influenced him, or he had influenced it. Trespassing, he'd become a manipulator. Maybe.

He wanted to be away from here. He wanted to wake up. He wanted his body back.

He wanted, most of all, not to feel he was part of a betrayal.

"Will that do, gentlemen?" Selkirk asked, opening the safe.

"That will do nicely," said the extractor. "I just need to retrieve the installation documentation, and we'll be on our way."

As Fischer watched, and watched doing nothing to prevent it, as Fischer in his woman's body sat, in fear or in doubt, in disorientation, in the end, like Hamlet, in purest hesitation, without moving, in the chair Selkirk had kindly provided him, the extractor stepped forward, Selkirk moving aside to give him room, and took from the safe a zippered black documents pouch.

Not, Fischer knew, the installation documentation. Not the warranty info. Not the number to call in case of a lock-out.

Secrets from Selkirk's mind.

"Thanks so much for your time, Mr. Selkirk," the extractor said, offering Selkirk his right hand along with his salesman's smile. "We'll trouble you no further."

#####

_Time to go,_ thought Fischer. _Please let it be time to go._ With Selkirk's secrets in hand, the rival extractor and his team had no reason to linger. And Fischer had no desire either to test the limits of Susan's ability to maintain her AGRESIV dreaming once the PASIV dream started to collapse or to be, himself, set upon by projections. Especially wearing a dress, women's shoes (for which he must have been, obviously, also subconsciously shopping), and a body that wasn't his.

He rose from the chair in Selkirk's study, followed at a slight distance as Selkirk saw the extractor and his dark-haired cohort back to the French doors. When the two of them had passed through and were crossing the stone patio (a bit too quickly, Fischer noted), he said: "Mr. Selkirk—?"

"Mm?" For a moment, Selkirk frowned after the departing men, as if there were something he'd forgotten to say to them. Fischer touched his arm, tentatively but firmly, and the man refocused on him— or _her_— Fischer for a moment dumbstruck at the delicacy of the fingers he was resting on the man's forearm— with a wistful smile. "Yes, my dear?"

_Who is he seeing?_ thought Fischer, looking back at him. _Who really?_

"I've left a friend at the party," he said. "He might be worried. Wondering where I've got off to."

"Of course." Selkirk's smile warmed to that of a genial host. "Go on. Enjoy yourself."

"Thank you." Fischer moved to go, to find Susan and Nick and Eames, to head back to reality. About three meters away from Selkirk he paused, though. He turned back to the older man and added: "You were very kind to—"

But Selkirk had gone. Fischer saw him through the thick glass panes of the door, walking slowly back to his oak-paneled study.

#####

Eames had managed to gravitate back nearer the house. Fresh drink in hand, he seemed, practically, to embody the idea of hiding in plain sight. "Don't look so stricken, Robert," he said, half over his shoulder, as Fischer approached. "Or should we say 'Roberta,' at least for the time being?" He was looking about casually. "Ah— there they are." Fischer followed his gaze to their left, saw Susan and Nick approaching from the vicinity of the loose press of projections surrounding the bar. "We'll drop your friend a head's-up when we get out. Anonymous call to let him know he's been rumbled. He'll be fine."

Fischer, still in his woman's body, didn't bother trying to look convinced. Nick reached them first. "We were nearly spotted," he said, quietly, keeping his eyes forward as he led them away from the patio. "Their forger: it had to have been. He was one of the waiters. Kept us pinned down at the bar; we had to keep blending in."

"It's over," said Eames. "Fischer saw everything."

"Did he—?" Susan asked, passing Fischer as she joined them.

"Yes, _she_ did," Eames said, tipping his head Fischer's way.

They were walking more quickly now than they had when they'd arrived; they were nearly to the break in the hedges through which they'd passed on their way from the waiting-room-slant-garden-shed. Without breaking stride, Susan looked back at Fischer.

Her eyebrows rose. "Well, hello," she purred.

A tingle where he'd never had a tingle before. An all-new type of tingle, well down in his belly. Behind his own mental scene, Fischer had been shopping for women's clothing, and now he found himself finding a woman with whom he'd been, over the past week, almost as an understatement, intensely carnally familiar attractive when he was a woman himself.

"Can we— umm— can we wake up now?" he asked.

Nick opened the door of the garden shed, looking up at the sky as he did. Though unblocked by the clouds, the sun seemed to be growing dimmer. "I think that would be wise," he said. He ushered the others into the waiting room as the sky darkened from afternoon to dusk; as Fischer stepped across the threshold, he felt as much as saw the light drop away completely. Nick stepped in after him, into the bridging area leading from the rival team's dreamscape back into Susan's, and closed the door.

Fischer knew, if he were to open it again, there'd be nothing beyond but blackness. Nothing beyond but nothing.

#####

When they got out, when they awoke in the rec area in the basement of the house, Chris was there waiting. Fischer, back in his own body, felt sleep-heavy but strangely exhilarated. Nick was sitting on the sofa, dropping his used IV needle into the biohazard box Chris held; beside Fischer, on the floor, Susan was a bit longer coming to. Not panicking, not visibly disoriented, but frowning slightly as she slowly sat up. "Hey," Fischer said, softly, touching her cheek with fingers again, blessedly, his, letting her focus on him as she had following the test-run in his room.

"I'm okay," she said, squeezing his hand. "Thank you."

Eames, for his part, was euphorically holding forth as he beelined into the kitchen.

"— might have seen him as a lost love, a youthful regret, possibly a daughter or niece," he was saying. Seemingly in a matter of moments, he reappeared in the doorway, already holding a glass of orange juice and a slice of toast smeared thickly with jam. Fischer could smell coffee brewing, too. "He could have an aptitude for it, Hanson," he said to Chris, around a mouthful of bread. "Being a forger. I thought he took to it quite well." A wink at Fischer. "One way of being yourself. Your own man. Or your own woman, as the case may be. I find it freeing, personally."

Possibly Susan's disorientation was mildly contagious. Or not. At the moment, the man's enthusiasm, let alone what he was suggesting, was a bit too much to take. Fischer looked to Nick as he and Susan got to their feet. "Is it true? If you vomit in a dream, do you vomit in the real world?"

"Did Eames tell you that?"

"Yes."

"He's an asshole. Totally untrue. Shitting yourself, on the other hand—"

Susan held up a warning hand. "Alright, alright, Nick: stop."

"Let's save some of the best surprises for later scenarios, shall we?" Eames grinned. "Coffee, anyone?"

"Sounds good, actually," said Nick. He and Chris made for the kitchen.

Fischer, hanging back with Susan near the dining table, looked grudgingly to Eames. "I should thank you, I suppose."

"For what?"

"You changed me into a woman."

Eames, having allowed Chris and Nick to pass into the kitchen, leaned into the doorframe. "No, love, you changed yourself into a woman. I put the suggestion— the belief— in your head. _You_ were the one who followed through on it."

"But— you said— Susan's breasts—"

"What about my breasts?" Susan asked, suspiciously.

"Whose breasts are foremost in your mind, Robert?" Eames's voice was satin-sly. "The texture, the _taste_. The softness of them. The weight of them in your hands. Whose?"

Fischer felt himself go red.

"Think I've heard enough for now. I'm going back to bed." Susan's tone was droll. Still, before she went, she laid her hand on Fischer's chest, leaned up to kiss his lips. "You did really well," she added, quietly. When their eyes met, it was as if Eames had vanished. "Give Nick the details regarding the other team's extractors; he'll take care of things with Selkirk's people. See you when it's properly morning, okay?"

Fischer tipped his forehead to hers. "Okay."

Only when she'd disappeared up the stairs did he notice the time, on the DVD player's digital display. It was just after two a.m.

#####

When he crept back into his bed, Susan was curled on her side beneath the covers, breathing slowly and steadily, her eyes closed, her face peaceful. Fischer spooned himself against her, slipped an arm across her waist, closed his eyes, and slid into a deep, sweet, seemingly dreamless sleep.

#####

#####

When next he woke, she was gone. Sunlight was etching its way around the deep blue drapes at the tall window. It was nine-forty. Fischer got up, pulled on his trousers and one of the new sweatshirts he'd bought at Selfridges, and went downstairs. Nick was in the workroom, eating from one of the helmet-sized cereal bowls, cartoons on three of the room's monitors, dream-tech on the rest. In the basement, in the rec area, a shirtless Eames, his shoulders and torso a gallery of exotic tattoos, moved in liquid slow motion through an elaborate series of stretching exercises. Chris was in the kitchen, whistling as he chopped something on a cutting board near the sink. At the dining table, Susan pored over a widespread newspaper while she ate oat porridge and toast. She looked up, bright-eyed and cheerful, as Fischer approached.

"Good morning. I need to have a word with you," she said, getting up. She took his hand, led him back up to the ground floor, then all the way upstairs. Fischer followed curiously.

Drawing him along the narrow corridor, then into her room, Susan said: "I think I owe you one." Suddenly, playfully, she bowled him onto the bed. Fischer went over, laughing in surprise. Then, as Susan unfastened his trousers, he tensed.

"What?" She looked from the vicinity of his lower belly with concern in her eyes. "Are you feeling alright?"

"No— I mean, yes." He found himself glancing away, ceilingward. "I just can't bear to look."

"At—?"

"My— umm. Ah, Christ." He put his hands to his head in embarrassment. "Is it there? I've been afraid to check. Did it come back?"

She freed him deftly from his briefs. She hitched down his trousers and began to stroke him. Fischer relaxed back against the coverlet, groaning softly in relief and arousal.

Susan chuckled. "I should say so."

Her hair wisped across the skin of his groin. Fischer closed his eyes, feeling her breath on his cock. When she swirled her tongue wetly over his glans, stars burst into supernovae beneath his lids.

"Well, I'm relieved to find you in good hands, Robert," a woman said.

Susan practically fell off the bed. Fischer grabbed for the coverlet, pulled it over his crotch, sat up. Fumbled, blushing furiously, with his trousers. "Christ, Therese. _Christ_—"

The woman at whom he directed both invective and name stood in the doorway, straight-spined, golden-haired, a touch short of average height: she who was, and who had been for nearly ten years, Fischer's personal assistant. Regimental bouts of Pilates and yoga had rewarded her, she being nearer sixty than not, with an ageless figure, presently armored in a heather-green suit-dress; she had a gray coat folded over her left arm, a briefcase in her right hand. Her features, normally slightly more severe than beautiful, were granite-locked in a diplomatic scowl, which she transmitted to Fischer and Susan via eyes of the purest glacial blue.

Calmly, Susan got up, went to the sink. Ran a half-glass of water, rinsed her mouth. Tidied her hair, straightened the hem of her loose black sweater. She turned to Therese coolly. "And what can we do for you, Miss Hobson?"

"That charming young man with the tattoos. A certain Mr. Eames," Therese clarified, her voice an icewater trickle, looking not at Susan but at Fischer, "told me you'd be up here. _Training_." She set her briefcase on the computer desk, opened it, removed a folded copy of the _Daily Mail,_ and handed it to him.

A three-column color photo. Fischer stared. Beneath the mistletoe at Selfridges, he and Susan were sharing a decidedly committed kiss. _Mad about you, _the caption read. _Australian energy magnate Robert Fischer takes time off from controversial shareholder lawsuit to 'recharge' with lady friend over the holidays._

"You ought to be more careful in your choice of detectives, Robert," Therese said. "Some people can be bought. He's not for you," she added, as if by way of explanation, for Susan's benefit. She met the younger woman's eyes. "Physically, at least, you appear to have kept him safe; we're grateful for that. Now it's time for him to come home."

Susan broke eye contact first. "You have things to discuss. I'll leave you to it." Her voice was far too calm. Stiff-backed, she headed for the door. "I'll be in ancient Greece," she said to Fischer.

"What—?"

"Ask Nick."

She walked out.

As Fischer looked after her, wanting to call to her but not knowing what to say, Therese took a foldered plane ticket from her briefcase. She held it out to him. "This is for you, Robert. Collect your things; we're leaving."

For a moment, he simply stared at the ticket. At her. "What are you doing here, Therese?"

"Browning sent me, of course. We've been worried about you. You've been completely incommunicado for over a week; what were we supposed to—" She stopped. In horror or wonder, maybe a mixture of both, she went on, as her eyes parsed the emotions in Fischer's face: "Are you in love with her? Good God, you are, aren't you?"

"I'm not sure—"

"Or you weren't until this very moment; am I right?"

She was, he realized. Like setting the energy state of a quantum particle through experimental observation: his mind cast out photons, and there stood love, his love for Susan, transfixed, defined, and very real.

"What she's done to you, she was contracted to do," Therese said, her voice slow and clear. A warning, almost, before the pouring of iodine into a cut. "But, unlike the girls you've known back home, who at least ply their trade honestly, she's been manipulating your emotions in the process— which is, of course, a very polite way of putting it."

It was as if his throat were closing up. Fischer swallowed. "I came to her for help. I thought I was going mad. She and Nick and Chris are helping me."

"I'm not ignorant, Robert. I know what PASIV is; I know what these people do. They're drug addicts; they are very likely criminals."

"Therese, don't. Please don't—"

"What is she, Robert? At the very least, have you given it any thought whatsoever— your status in relation to hers? Is she the kind of girl you could present socially? The kind you could introduce to your friends?"

"Friends?" Anger flared in him; he only barely managed not to shout. "What bloody friends? I have you; I have Uncle Peter; I have the company. My entire life has been—"

"I should have seen it. I should have known this would happen—"

Therese caught herself, went silent.

Very quietly, Fischer asked: "What?"

"What—?" she echoed, her voice flat.

Suddenly, the world seemed, time itself seemed, to move more slowly. Fischer let himself fall victim, too, to relativity; when he next spoke, he seemed to hear himself, if clearly, from a great distance: "You should have known I would fall for her? How would you have known that?"

Therese didn't reply. She'd gone into lockdown, as it were. As if she'd that quickly filed away her emotions in a vault in the arctic.

Fischer looked at her coldly. "How much have you known about my training in dream-defense?"

She might have been mute her entire life. She looked back at him, not speaking.

"Therese, please—"

A longer draught of silence. Then: "Everything. From the beginning. Your father told me."

A muscle began to quiver in Fischer's jaw. "And you'd stand here and accuse Susan of emotional manipulation. Of drugging me, using me—"

"All I've ever wanted was to keep you safe."

As if that could fix everything. She sounded, as childless as she'd remained, like a mother. The mother Fischer had lost. He should have been furious, but he was too weak or too fond: his eyes filled with tears.

There were tears in her eyes, too. She seemed suddenly much older, more frail or worn, than she had when she arrived. Or ever, for that matter. Fischer took her gently by the upper arms, kissed her cheek. He closed his eyes for a moment, letting his lips linger tenderly against her skin; then he let her go. He stood before her and said. "Look at me, Therese. Look at me. Do I look sick? Strung out?"

She replied, with honesty and genuine affection: "No. You look very well, Robert."

"I feel better than I have in months." He took the plane ticket from her, laid it back in her briefcase. "I need to stay here a while longer." To the protest reviving in her face he said: "But I'll check in; I'll be in touch. I'll be home soon enough."

#####

She acceded; she surrendered the argument with grace. Fischer walked her out. At the door, Therese turned to him. "You will offer Miss Gaumont my apologies?"

"Of course."

"And, if you would, give her my regards and best wishes for the holidays." She added, slightly wry now, for the benefit of the blankness in Fischer's face: "Even if it feels like July, it _is_ nearly Christmas, Robert."

She smiled, though her eyes stayed sober. Her expression, Fischer realized, said that she knew her longtime charge was, for the first time, keeping company with a potential mate. She took his hand, a handshake in parting; Fischer held on to her a moment longer than formality required.

"Thank you, Therese. Safe flight," he said.

#####

When she'd gone, in a black gleaming sedan that seemed to materialize from thin air at the foot of the front steps, Fischer found his boots, got his coat from the hall closet, and called toward the workroom: "Ancient Greece, Nick—?"

"The museum, of course," Nick called back. "Ground floor."

#####

#####

It was another clear, cool day. Fischer joined the loose throng of early morning visitors passing through the main entrance of the British Museum from Great Russell Street; inside, he bore to the left, through Minoa and Crete; he wended past sarcophagi and tall glass cases, bits of jewelry, verdigris-green coins, tiny gold statuettes blunted and roughened by time. In ancient Greece, in a second room of cases filled with pottery and vases displaying, in matte black and reddish orange, a panorama of life, of domesticity and war, of gods and heroes, he found Susan.

He approached quietly, slipped his arms loosely around her from behind, and asked, softly, close to her left ear: "Come here often, beautiful?"

"It's another way of staying grounded. Studying antiquities. Minutiae. Counting small objects."

"Sounds very obsessive-compulsive."

"It is." She relaxed back against him. "Where's Therese?"

"Returning to Sydney." He added, quietly: "I'm not leaving, Susan."

She eased away from him, moved on to the next display. In the set of her shoulders, in the relaxed angle of her neck, Fischer read profound relief. "You're angry with her," she said.

"Of course I am."

"Don't be."

"Susan—"

"Don't." She hung back as he did, as a flock of schoolchildren in uniform passed through, headed and followed by either of a pair of professionally harried-looking mid-thirty-something teachers, one male, one female; she slipped her arm through his, then, as they continued their wending way among the cases. "She's worried about you. And she's a bit jealous, too."

"Jealous of what?"

"She loves you, Robert. You _are_ lovable, you know."

"Am I?"

"I'll rephrase it: you _could _be lovable."

He asked: "Are you in love with me, Susan?"

Almost breathtakingly blunt. She looked at him evenly, a trace of a smile on her lips. "I am in... the protean stage of loving you, I would say."

"I'm a little further along than that when it comes to you."

"Are you sure of that?" Susan reached to touch his cheek. "For that matter, are you sure that you're doing the right thing, staying here?"

"Absolutely. I've never been more sure of anything in my life."

He hadn't been. He was telling the truth, or he believed, absolutely, that he was; and wasn't that, in terms of reality, the same thing? He drew her aside, to make way for a group of tourists wearing a rainbow's-worth of puffed parkas and armed with point-and-shoots. Susan thoughtfully bit her lower lip as she watched them pass by. "You haven't had your breakfast," she said.

"I don't mind," Fischer replied. He leaned his head closer to hers and murmured: "I love you, Susan."

"We could see what the cafe is offering for brunch. They do a wonderful carrot cake." As the last of the tourists filed through, en route to the Elgins, she turned and stole from him a slow, tender kiss. "I love you, too, Robert."

She smiled for him and led the way out of the gallery. Fischer followed. They were going, he knew, only as far as an on-premises eatery, but that didn't matter.

By now, he would have gone with her anywhere.

#####

#####

_About time,_ thought Doug Brenner, as Gaumont and her billionaire boy-man left the room.

He'd been standing in their periphery, less than five meters away, for nearly fifteen minutes, feigning an intent study of a low glass case of ancient household implements. Amazing, really, not only what the tunnel-vision of true love but a fresh haircut and new togs could do: all short-back-and-sides, wearing a spendy leather jacket from a trendy outfitter, Brenner had become, outwardly at least, a new man. Mere days ago, Robert Fischer had stared at him outside The 41 with something much akin to terror in his freakish blue eyes. Now the formerly shaggy, trenchcoated Brenner was quite invisible, both to the paranoid young tycoon and, apparently, his lady-love. In a way, he was disappointed: while Fischer, certainly, was a classic sheep for the fleecing, Gaumont had initially shown the promise of danger.

No matter. Either way, Brenner was being paid, and paid well, to do his job. Part of which involved keeping tabs on Robert Fischer and those with whom he was presently associating.

He left ancient Greece, and Minoa and Crete, and strolled in the direction of the Gallery Cafe.

#####

#####

#####


	7. Chapter 7

**A/N:** Well, this is it. We're going to end this thing on a somewhat seafaring note, with a tribute to two of my favorite oceangoing action flicks. (And if you thought that _Titanic_ was one of them, you'd be wrong... but you'd be very, _very_ close. Heh.) Thanks kindly for reading. Hope it's been worth your while!

#####

#####

Rosalind Laemmle had arrived. When Susan and Fischer returned from the museum, she was in the entranceway of the house, handing a worn leather jacket and a scarlet scarf off to Nick, their erstwhile doorman. She was in her mid to late twenties, tall and lean in worn sand-colored cargo pants, a midnight-blue commando sweater, gray light tactical boots; and she was of Jamaican extraction, or so Chris had told them. Black hair worn short, straight, slightly wild; sharp, deeply brown eyes wideset in an admittedly beautiful face; and skin the color of—

_Cappuccino_, Fischer decided, looking at her.

He must have thought the word a little too loudly, or have been staring a little too obtusely; she abandoned the smile with which she was handing Nick her coat, turned to him, and asked: "Do you have a problem with blacks, Mr. Fischer?"

"No." That quickly, she'd caught him gawking, and they both knew it. As his cheeks went hot, he tried not to sputter. "I— umm— Of course I don't."

"Good. Some of you rich bastards are too classless to admit it. How about you, Miss Gaumont?"

"The only problem I have is with someone eying my claim," Susan replied, dryly.

Laemmle glanced at Fischer slyly, a little wolfishly. "He's the right kind of eyeful, you must admit." She offered Susan her hand. "Roz Laemmle. Glad to know you."

Susan smiled, relaxing, as she shook Laemmle's hand. "Susan Gaumont."

"Hey, Roz." Chris, followed by Eames, who'd pulled on a black t-shirt, was coming up from the basement.

"Chris." Laemmle ignored the hand he extended, caught him in a hug. "Sorry I'm so bloody late." She was a bit chillier with Eames. "The pet shop was sold out of snakes?"

"Don't worry, Rosalind. They've been minding their wallets, and they've been careful to lock up the silverware after every meal." Eames leaned smoothly in to kiss her cheek; just as smoothly, Laemmle leaned away. "You are looking _scrumptious_."

"If you want to keep those teeth, you'll shut up now." She looked from him to Chris and the others. "So why am I here? What's your plan?"

"In a word," Susan replied, "disruption."

#####

#####

Again, though, it came down to waiting.

While AGRESIV sat, fully charged but unlit and unbeeping, in the workroom, they cleaned. They worked out. They strayed in ones or twos from the house, to run, swim, or shop for necessaries, but never very far, and never for very long. They cooked and ate communal dinners (which Fischer enjoyed almost more than he cared to admit, the simple humanity of it, the basic, unstressed cooperation); they even had movie nights by draw, the winner to pick the film— which nearly came to a halt on the first evening, when Eames countered Laemmle's fondness for Fassbinder by professing his secret love for Ingmar Bergman.

Through what Nick would describe only as "the channels," they learned that Selkirk's people were discreetly following up on his attack, that they'd put feelers out for the directions in which the information stolen from his head might have leaked, accompanied by the descriptions of his assailants that Nick, anonymously, via Fischer, had provided. "I know you know Mr. Selkirk as a good and gentle man," Susan said to Fischer, quietly, "but I would hate to be in their shoes if and when he catches up to them."

In the meantime, Fischer, armed with with telecom tech from Nick, checked in with Therese and with Peter Browning, whose initial view of Fischer's situation— in brief, that Robert, his godson and nephew, distraught, disoriented, on the brink of a mental breakdown, had fallen in with a gang of drug-addicted criminals— was replaced, unshakably (and very likely with Therese's help), by the impression that Robert, the lucky S.O.B., was keeping company with at least two beautiful and exotic young women in a trendy private B&B.

#####

Three days in to their AGRESIV vigil, while yet another meteorological mess, a wind-driven slurry of rain and snow, bombarded the house, the six of them sat in the basement, talking over a late dinner of crusty bread, Romaine salad, and lamb stew.

"Projections, in case you haven't noticed," Eames was saying to Fischer, "don't tend to be very bright. A shame Chris is insisting on heading our physical security: I'm sure he'd be remarkably adept at passing as one."

Susan calmly cleared her throat as Chris reached for a knife slightly too sharp for buttering bread; she said, as Chris, glowering at Eames, settled back into his chair: "At best, they operate on instinct. Borrowed instinct, rather: the subconscious instincts of their home-mind. Now," she added, breaking off a chunk of bread for herself, "if _intelligent_ projections were a possibility..."

"Or actual sentient mind-guardians," Nick chimed in. "Now, _that_ would be interesting."

Fischer looked across the table at him. "On-call mental security services, you mean."

"Mm hm. The trick would be getting the mind to accept the protectors. Introducing them in such a way that they would seem innate, not intrusive. Finding, in a manner of speaking, an anti-rejection drug. Something that wouldn't trigger the mind's white blood cells."

"Something that would make the protectors seem like projections," said Laemmle.

"Then again," said Chris, "people being what they are, they'd find a way to fuck it up. Imagine this: dream-techs being kidnapped and co-opted into providing security services. Being kept under practically forever by—"

He stopped, fixed his eyes on his plate.

"—people rich enough to make other people disappear—?" Fischer suggested, bleakly.

He admired Chris for how straightforward the man could be; sometimes he found his honesty chilling. As now. Chris looked across at him and replied, bluntly: "Yes."

"Back to the idea of mind-guardians," said Susan. "Acceptance comes later. For now, more or less, we're going for shock tactics."

"'It's the police. Open up!'?" Eames offered.

"Something like that, yes. We identify the extractors, we alert the mark about the attack, kick him free if the chance arises—"

She stopped, cocking her head toward the stairs. The rest of them went quiet, listening as she did.

Upstairs in the workroom, AGRESIV had started to beep.

#####

"Remember," said Susan, as they ran through the pre-sleep checklist, as Nick mustered the Somnacin, "we won't be inside by _anyone's_ invitation. Any attempt to disrupt the scenario will be taken as an act of aggression, both by the dreamer's mind and by the rival team."

"In other words," said Eames, pushing up the right sleeve of the burgundy sweater he wore, "everyone will be shooting at us, if we're found out."

"_When_ we're found out," Susan corrected him. "It's inevitable."

Nick watched the vials of Somnacin empty into AGRESIV's central reservoir. "And any 'nonlocalized' ruckus will alert the original team— the bad guys— that something is wrong, even if it's not immediately apparent that a second team is on the case."

Fischer asked: "Won't it be dangerous for the mark?"

Susan looked at him. "How so?"

"Real-world retaliation," Chris said. He caught Fischer's eye. "That's what you're thinking, right? The bad guys realize they've been fucked, they wake up, they take it out on the mark. A beating, maybe even kidnapping or murder."

"I thought," says Eames, "that most of us were in this business because we were too genteel or too humane to get our real hands really dirty."

"You can say 'cowardly,' Eames," Laemmle told him. "We'll forgive you."

Nevertheless, she was now hesitating. And, like the others, she was looking to Susan.

"No." Susan frowned pensively as she spoke. "They'll abandon the mark and the job. They've already been paid; they'll take their money and run."

"Next thing," said Chris. "You want to indulge me, Sue?" He looked worried. "I think we should set up in the attic for this one."

"Any particular reason?" Eames asked.

"No. Just a feeling."

Susan patted his shoulder. "Sure, Chris. No problem."

#####

They went all the way to the top of the house and set up. The building, if cramped to its external sides, was free-standing: there were no crossover walls, present or former, between it and its neighbors. They entered the attic via a door and a ladder folding down from the ceiling at the far end of the second-floor corridor, where Chris had his room; at approximately waist level, set into the roof facing Montague, were two narrow, dust-encrusted dormer windows that they might use as exits in case of emergency. As Nick and Laemmle spread cushioning blankets on the rough wood floor, Fischer shuddered, imagining fire, smoke creeping in choking tendrils around the edges of the door near his feet. No, they wouldn't be trapped, he told himself, as he forced himself to relax, to unbunch his shoulder muscles, to draw and release deep, full breaths.

As the imagined weight of the roof pressed down on his head.

#####

#####

Susan's, again, was their entry-dream. Under AGRESIV's spell, she, Fischer, and Eames passed through the door of Nick's waiting-room bridging scenario: they emerged into fresh salt air near the clear dark water of yet another swimming pool. Fischer glanced behind them at the white changing-building from which they'd just apparently come.

Nick, who'd been waiting on the door's other side, caught him looking. "Feel free to make with the cabana-boy jokes," he said.

They were on the promenade deck of an ocean liner at sunset, and they were alone near the pool. It was too chilly to swim, thought Fischer, which would mean, for purposes of the dreamscape, casino time, dance time, or party time for the passengers aboard. Also, people tended to want to bed down when night fell. An automatic diurnal response. Something the other team's architect would likely be thinking.

A westerly breeze blew in from across the water. A roll of clouds edged the horizon, still underlit by the sun, and the air held the promise or threat of rain. Fischer looked to the others. Perhaps it was a trick of the fading light, but—

"You're looking green, Mr. Eames," he said.

"I had a bad feeling going under." Eames swallowed, looked away from the ocean. "It _would _have to be a bloody boat."

Fischer felt a devilish sense of gratification. "Not only are we dreaming, we're on a ship the size of Tasmania."

"It's not the motion— it's the way the waves—" Eames looked desperately to Nick and Susan. "If it's no fucking trouble, can we please go inside?"

There was a saloon door, its top half frosted glass, its bottom half polished wood, in the superstructure to their right. "My advice? Keep it down," whispered Fischer, as he followed Eames, and the others, into the ship.

"Shut up," Eames gritted in reply.

#####

They were in evening wear when they stepped inside, into a galleria of tiny shops overlooking the ship's grand salon two decks below. Tuxes, black for Fischer and Nick, white for Eames. And, for Susan—

"The simple black dress that solves all of life's little problems," said Eames appreciatively, a little too immediately regaining his composure for Fischer's taste.

Said dress was sleeveless, abbreviated tastefully both above and below, wrapping without constricting Susan's lean curves. She wore matching black shoes, stylish but sensible; she, like the rest of them, was wearing a discreet communications earpiece. Fischer stopped himself from asking how, in a dream, cut loose from the physical laws of the real world, let alone from the reach of communications satellites and multi-G networks, such devices were supposed to work. _Better not to jinx it,_ he thought.

Again, as in their first dream using AGRESIV, he and Eames were to act as lookouts and to run interference. Susan and Nick were to stay invisible to the PASIV dreamer's projections and to the enemy team for as long as possible, and then disrupt said team's attack, alerting the mark in the process. The immediate problem, more prosaically, was basic orientation.

"If you were going to steal something of great value from someone aboard a ship—" Nick began.

"Purser's office," Susan finished. "Typically on the first deck just off the grand lobby."

"Worth a try."

Eames was listening to the sounds coming from below. Big-band music, plenty of trombone and trumpet, forward and distant; from directly below came chatter, a tinkling of bells, a bicycle-spoke clattering. He strolled over to the gleaming brass railing on the far side of the walkway fronting the shops. "Casino, one deck below," he said, looking down. "Robert and I will trail you in from there."

"Fine," said Susan. "Give us a minute or so head-start."

She and Nick moved away; Fischer caught her hand. "Be careful, Susan."

"You, too." She fingered his lapel, smiled as she leaned up to kiss the corner of his mouth. "That's a _lovely_ tux, Mr. Fischer."

#####

She and Nick made their down to the casino via a curving staircase at the forward end of the shops; just past the casino's midpoint, the stairs continued down to the first deck where, thankfully, it was a simple matter of following signs and polished wall-mounted brass arrows. She and Nick walked side-by-side into the purser's office, their movements synchronized and casually robotic. Behind the front counter, more gleaming wood, more brass, a middle-aged man with a dark and receding hairline, uniformed crisply in white, was typing an entry at a black keyboard and monitor. At his back, the door of the main vault was open. A second man, with a pinched, pensive face and vaguely wild but tamed mink-brown hair, of age similar to the first, also uniformed in white, was inside. With him was a tall woman in her well-preserved early sixties, leonine, golden-haired, classically beautiful, striking in an antique-silver evening dress.

"I do beg your pardon," said the man at the counter, as he finished his typing. Susan looked past him into the vault, where the golden-haired woman was saying something very quietly to the second man as he opened one of the midsize wall safes.

"There." Man the first looked away from his screen, trained pale blue eyes directly on Susan. "Now, what can we do for you, Miss Gaumont?"

#####

#####

_And when you don't follow the instincts that tell you how wrong, how very wrong, things feel, you stupid man, you bloody presumptuous fool,_ thought Eames, _this is what happens_.

They were on to him, and on to Fischer, too, almost the second they set foot in the casino. The projections.

A middle-aged woman oh-so-wrongly stuffed into red Vera Wang bumped into him when he stepped onto the casino floor; _she_ bumped _him_, and a second later, the tux-bursting hulk who had to be her husband, a nightmare behemoth seemingly modeled on dreams of rugby-glory lost, who might easily have snapped up a _This Sporting Life_-era Richard Harris in two bites for breakfast, was taking it out on Fischer not so much verbally as with a snarl and a push.

"Sorry. So sorry," Eames said, catching Fischer by the arm as Fischer, shocked and shoved, stumbled. "Entirely our fault."

He led Fischer away from the offended couple, but already it was too late. He felt the eyes focusing on them as they moved into the casino, toward the bar and, beyond that, the railing marking the overlook to the first deck. He felt the _convergence_.

"They're on to us," he said to Fischer.

To his credit, Fischer cast no panicked looks over his shoulders. "How?" he asked, quietly.

"I'm not sure." They were nearly to the bar. Eames tried his earpiece. "Susan? Nick—?"

Nothing. Of-course-bloody-nothing. He shook his head; Fischer took the cue, finger-tipping his transmitter, muttering names, and then shaking his head in turn: of-course-bloody-nothing for him, too.

They were at the bar, and the tender, male, twentyish, tall, and prematurely balding, was, with his eyes on Eames and Fischer, reaching for something in front of him, at thigh level and out of sight. Eames took the man smoothly by the back of the neck and smashed his forehead and nose into the bar's glowing underlit granite top, then shoved the fellow's limp body to the side as he and Fischer occupied the space behind the bar. What the man had been reaching for— or what Eames had thought he was reaching for and what was now, therefore, what the man had been reaching for in fact— was a pump-action shotgun clamped to the back of the bar's front wall.

Eames took the shotgun for himself; he took, too, a Glock that just happened, with the merest bit of imagination, to be under the bar as well and handed it to Fischer.

"Will this really be necessary—?" Fischer asked, doubtfully eying the gun in his hand.

A query that might have been apt, were they to be set upon only by fat overdressed toffs. When half a dozen white-uniformed crewmembers burst in at the casino's forward end and opened fire on the bar with assault rifles, the question, thought Eames, answered itself.

"Afraid so," he said, as he and Fischer dropped behind the bar, in a shower of glass and gin and Glenlivet. Then, much to Eames's disappointment, as he angled for a view of their assailants that would not concomitantly involve him having his head blown off, Fischer hunched in beside him, cowering in fear.

Or was he?

As Eames got off a shot, then another, and missed both times, he could hear Fischer muttering. A stream of soft syllables as he focused, frowning, on a middle space ahead of him, as he flinched away from a splattering of vodka and more shards of glass. _Methyls_ and _bi-ethyls, oxides,_ _point_-_thises_, _point_-_thats_. Eames popped off another handful of shots while Fischer, his eyes closed tight, chanted a litany of entries from the periodic table.

From the other side of the bar, the gunfire became more sporadic. A stray shot struck a burst of crystal from a chandelier above the roulette table to their right.

And then the shooting stopped altogether.

Eames waited through ten seconds of shot-free stillness, then looked cautiously out at the casino floor. The projections, armed and not, had stopped their advance. A number of them were stumbling aimlessly about; several of them had collapsed. As Eames watched, one of the crewmen dropped his rifle, fell to his knees, a dumb grin on his face, and toppled onto his side.

"Holy shit," Fischer breathed. He was beside Eames, looking out, too. "It worked."

"What the hell did you do?"

"I— umm— You showed me— In the first dream, you showed me how to visualize, right? And Chris, too: the different ways of altering the dreamscape, and yourself within the dreamscape— When we shoot, that's basically visualization, isn't it? Picturing the bullets entering the projections—?"

Whether that was how it worked or not, Eames could see that Fischer, wound up and shaking, was in no shape for argument. So he simply nodded.

"This time," Fischer continued, his voice an inexorable soft half-babble, "I thought, _Why not do it on a molecular level?_ I'm a chemical engineer; I simply— simply—"

"Simply what, Robert?" Eames prompted, patiently.

"Converted five percent of the water in their brains to alcohol."

"Oh."

"It's just that I hate guns," Fischer continued, obviously misreading Eames's stunned disbelief as disappointment. "I was too afraid to engage them face-to-face."

"No, no. No." Eames patted his shoulder. "Whatever your motivation, it worked."

Fischer smiled, if still a little uncertainly. "What now?"

"Now I warn Susan and Nick, and you—"

"Mister Fischer, might I have a word?"

A man's voice, roughly five meters away, to their left, from the direction of the stairs. Eames looked. Beside him, Fischer started.

One of the projections was still standing. A tall man, lanky in a peacock-blue tux, a ruff-front salmon shirt, dark-haired, even darker-eyed, ill-shaven but handsome in a jaw-heavy way. He was looking at them, and at Fischer particularly, with a wild grin on his face.

"It's him—" Fischer said. "Christ, I should have known—"

"_Who_-him?" Eames demanded.

"The shaggy man. Outside the hotel. In the museum: it was him—"

"See you on the flipside, Robert," the man called, his voice a jeering sing-song.

Then he took an automatic from the jacket pocket of that awful tux, shot himself in the right temple, and crumpled to the casino floor.

Fischer stared. "What the hell—"

"If we weren't rumbled before, we are now," Eames said. "I'll find the others; go."

He and Fischer left the shelter of the bar. Fischer went to the railing separating the casino from the drop to the floor of the grand lounge.

"Good luck, Eames," he said, glancing back.

He leapt the railing. Fell.

#####

#####

Woke.

Fischer opened his eyes, sat up. Looked around, the darkness of the attic held back by the pale light of a single battery-powered camp lantern, his heart pounding.

Susan was beside him, unconscious. Nick and Eames were asleep as well.

But Chris wasn't with them. Nor was Laemmle.

He didn't know what to do. The plan, as always, had been for a guardian to stay with the dreamers at all times. Below, within the dreamscape, as far as he knew, Susan and Nick, possibly warned by Eames, were still doing their job: even if he could be sure he could do so safely, Fischer would be hesitant to wake them.

He pulled the IV needle from his wrist, stood, went to the square door set in the floorboards. He was about to open it when he heard the ruckus downstairs.

And then, before he could touch the handle, the door opened from below.

#####

Eames made his way to the first deck, keeping an eye out for fresh, unintoxicated projections; near a fountain in the atrium, he passed Fischer's body, back-twisted, blood pooled beneath his skull, his eerily blue eyes fixed on the ship's skylight high above. Eames looked away. Even after all this time, all his experience, it was still disconcerting seeing someone dream-dead, especially when that someone was not only paying the bills but seemed a clever and decent enough fellow in the bargain.

As Susan and Nick had done earlier, he followed arrows and signs; as he neared the purser's office, he was following, too, the sounds of a fight.

#####

#####

Up top, the house had come under siege.

And Fischer, he who hated guns, recoiled as he saw, in the hand of the man ascending into the attic—

— the shaggy man, or formerly shaggy man, who had stalked Fischer and Susan and the others both in dreams and in reality—

— the thirty-eight Fischer had had in his coat pocket when he came to the house on Montague Street.

Fischer didn't hesitate. He dropped through the opening of the attic door right onto the man's head.

They fell together in a surprised flailing of arms and legs. The gun skittered one way on the worn hallway carpeting; the man, twisting away from Fischer on the floor, gained his footing and ran another, toward the upper-story stairs. Fischer ran after him. Down the steep and narrow staircase they went, then on down the twisting ground-levels—

"Get him, Fischer—!" Chris, from the workroom, shouting. "Get him! Go!" He was in the process of pummeling a second invader, a burly man clad, like the man Fischer was chasing, all in black. "Roz is after another one."

#####

#####

Eames reached the purser's office. Inside, Susan Gaumont, in her simple black dress, was trading blows, blocks, and body-kicks with a big, middle-aged man in a white crewman's uniform. The door to the main vault was closed. And, off to the side, watching in horror, stood a gently aged, amber-eyed beauty who looked for all the world like Catherine Deneuve.

Having assessed the situation, Eames moved on to a quick assumption. "Ma'am," he said to the woman, "the pugnacious young lady and I are from MG Consultants, Limited." As the woman stared at him, stunned or in shock (but at least not attacking: no, certainly, he'd found the mark, not another damned projection), Eames tried a reassuring smile. "You've been kidnapped into an illegally synthesized dreamscape; we're here to help." Behind him, Susan and the purser continued their brawl. "That said, please do forgive me."

He slugged the woman in the jaw, caught her as she slumped, lowered her to the deck. Straightening, he stepped in behind Susan's opponent.

"Allow me." Eames yanked the man's uniform jacket down off his shoulders, pinning his arms within his sleeves. Susan stepped in, deftly took the man's wallet from his inner jacket pocket, found the key card inside it. She greenlit the lock on the vault door, then swung around, momentum and every bit of her body weight behind the blow, and decked the man with a right hook.

Inside the vault, the rival team's extractor had words for Nick's ears only. He'd caught Nick with a savage flurry of body-blows when Nick, leaving Susan to handle the man at the counter, confronted him in the vault. The mark had stepped clear; likely, she'd fled. Now, with the door of the vault locked shut behind them, the extractor had Nick in a headlock on the floor, and he was hissing in Nick's ear, as Nick, the air being crushed from his windpipe, black stars bursting behind his retinas, too slowly passed out: "There are some particularly ill-advised ways to kick out, aren't there? One of which is being choked to death. Suffocating. You never forget it, or so I'm told."

Then the door swung open.

The rival extractor looked up, surprised. Eames charged him, bowled him off of Nick; the man scuttled away. Like a crab or a spider, impossible to grab. He was out of the vault with Eames after him. At the door to the purser's office, Eames, his fingertips brushing the man's sleeve, nearly had him—

An explosion rocked the ship. Klaxons whooped as the lights went out. Eames stumbled as the near bulkhead slammed into him; the extractor got away. In a flare-pocket of red-and-yellow emergency light ten meters away, the man paused, turned back with a leer, and ran off into the darkness.

A rumbling from the left. Eames looked. "Oh, hell—"

A wall of water was heading their way.

"Susan," he shouted, "we're going!"

#####

#####

_Get him—!_

That was all Fischer heard. He was out the door after the formerly shaggy man— bloody hell, it _was_ him, wasn't it?— into wind and sleet and snow. The man broke left, fleeing. He was tall, with a tall man's long legs, but Fischer was light and fast, hellishly fast, even with icy treachery underfoot. They crossed Great Russell Street through pockets of streetlight; they ran through darkness past Bloomsbury Square; at High Holborn, the man ignored the traffic signals and sprinted on, Fischer less than ten meters away, through the glare of headlamps and a blaring of horns. He ran on into Holborn Station, and there, behind him, on the wet tiles Fischer slipped and landed hard on his left knee.

By the time he was back on his feet, no more than three seconds later, to the stares of people entering and exiting the station, the man was through the turnstiles and onto the downward escalator.

_Damnation_—

A station cop, capped, stolid, fortyish, the reflector bars on his black vest catching the station's sterile light, was already looking Fischer's way. If Fischer tried to jump the turnstile, he'd be caught. He turned toward a ticket kiosk, fumbling his wallet out of his jeans pocket, pushed a twenty-pound note through the indent below the Plexiglas window. "One, please."

He took the ticket pushed to him in turn; he turned away; to the booth-operator's "Your change—", he called over his shoulder: "Give it to OxFam—!"

Through the stiles Fischer went, slotting his single ticket; he caught it on the other side and ran for the escalators heading down.

#####

#####

In the purser's office, Nick, beaten, nearly asphyxiated, was in bad shape. Eames pulled one of the man's arms over his shoulder, hauling him, with Susan's help, to his feet; they and she broke into a run across the first-deck atrium, heading for the curving grand staircase leading up to the casino. A new crop of projections, unmindful of the oncoming flood, turned on them, rushed them. Susan, producing for herself a pair of machine pistols from a hiding-place about which Eames would been more than happy to speculate in less-deadly times, mowed them a path.

"What happens if we drown in here?" he asked, panting, as they bolted up the stairs.

"Not sure," Susan replied, panting in turn. "Not sure I want to find out, either."

One deck up. Two.

And then, in the galleria, another dozen armed projections stood between them and the exit to the promenade deck.

Susan pulled up short, just ahead of a hail of bullets, and ducked with Eames and Nick behind a support pillar. She glanced over the railing to their right. The water had reached the casino. Slot machines shorted out in showers of sparks.

"Will we kick out if we jump?" Nick asked faintly.

"I don't know, Nick," Susan said. "I doubt it. How much longer on the timer, do you think?"

Eames took one of the machine pistols for himself, traded fire with the projections. "Afraid we can't rely on that, Susan."

For a moment, Susan froze. Then she asked, in realization and quiet horror: "Where's Robert, Eames?" In the fight, in the tumult both in and outside of the office, she'd forgotten— "They knew my bloody name—"

"Fischer's out." Eames flinched away as a bullet bit a marble chip from the column near his head. "I think it's time we were, too."

Susan looked at him, met his eyes, nodded. He looked back at her, then slammed Nick headfirst into their sheltering pillar. "Sorry, darling," he murmured. He eased Nick's body to the walkway behind them, turned. Susan was already leveling the muzzle of her machine pistol at his forehead.

Eames grinned at her. "You're going to enjoy this, aren't you—"

Another explosion rocked the ship. The walkway collapsed beneath them. Susan, falling toward the black roiling water, was separated from Eames and Nick. She hit, the gun flying out of her hand; she submerged briefly, then surfaced— and there was Fischer, broken and soaked, bobbing toward her.

They were being swirled under the ceiling of the casino; there, they would drown. She couldn't help it; she screamed: "Robert—!"

She took in a mouthful, a lungful, of water. She panicked. Flailed as the dark water broke over her head. Coughed, choked—

#####

#####

And woke up.

Chris was beside her. On AGRESIV's far side, Nick was sitting up, slowly shaking his head. Eames wasn't there. Nor was Fischer.

Though she was no longer drowning, the feeling remained. Hoarsely, weakly, Susan repeated for the beams of the attic ceiling the last question she'd asked in the dream: "Where's Robert?"

"Hunting," Chris replied, sounding grim but satisfied as he looked down at her. "We were found out, Sue. They broke in. Three of them. We have one downstairs; one got away. Fischer's running down number three."

#####

Fischer slipped like an eel through the press on the escalator heading down to the Central Line. Still, his progress was slow, and slowing: the crush of people ahead of him on the downbound stairs was becoming impenetrable. Opposite, though, on the innermost of the upbound escalators, was a long swath of open space. _Just do it,_ as Chris would say. Fischer flung himself onto and across the center divider, caught his ribs on one of the surf-blocks, kicked off another, then an emergency-stop lamp after that, more falling than sliding on the steep metal surface: eight meters down or better, he twisted off the divider and landed on his feet on the upbound stairs. Breathless with adrenaline, bruised, exhilarated, he sprinted downward, twisted his way, swift as a snake, through a loose throng of surprised escalator-riders heading up; he reached the bottom and propelled himself after the formerly shaggy man. In an access tunnel leading to the eastbound platform, he finally caught up. The man turned on him, swinging a sudden, savage right; Fischer ducked and swung back, all one smooth, fast motion; his left fist caught the man right on the point of the chin. The man stumbled, stunned, into the side of the tunnel.

And then, just as a transit cop paused, looking their way, in the tunnel's station-side opening, Laemmle was there. "Oops," she giggled. "Found you, you bad boys." She looked at Fischer, her eyes deadly serious above her smile, and took one of the man's arms before he could slump to the tunnel floor. Fischer, with a only a matching stupid grin for a disguise, took the other.

"Where are the others?" he asked quietly, panting.

"Susan's still groggy. She's okay; Nick is with her. Chris has one of our friends trussed up back at the house; the other one got away. Eames is—" They left the tunnel; as they passed by the policeman, Laemmle leaned across their captive, nearly tangling all their feet, and planted a playful kiss on Fischer's lips.

"What are you do—" he began.

"Happy holidays, love!" Laemmle smiled drunkenly for the transit cop, then added, under her breath, as they reached the escalators: "According to Chris, you are paying me very good money to keep you safe, Mr. Fischer. Eames is outside with the car."

They escorted the formerly shaggy man back to the surface, where, at the turnstiles, Laemmle produced two tickets, one for her passage and for his. As she reached into her pocket for them, she passed Fischer, briefly and surreptitiously, a small, wicked, blue-and-black-handled knife. Outside, just short of the news vendors on Kingsway, Eames was waiting in a nondescript gray Ford sedan. Laemmle opened the back door, smoothly hooked her left fist into their captive's jaw, got in, and pulled him after her as his knees buckled. Fischer heaved the man the rest of the way into the car, got in after him. As far as he could tell, the fellow was out.

Only when they had pulled out into traffic did he feel his heart racing. But it was an elated racing. He caught Eames's eye in the rearview mirror. "Why are you driving, Eames?"

"Not my bag, darling. Foot-chases in the Tube: too cliched for my discriminating tastes."

"What he's really saying," said Laemmle, "is that he's afraid. Correct?"

Eames met her eyes in the mirror. _Bugger off, _he mouthed.

"Longtime PASIV users: they can't stand it." With her arm locked through the arm of the formerly shaggy man, the tip of her knife-blade resting about level with his spleen, Laemmle looked to Fischer. "Not the crowding so much. Not the darkness, or so I'm told. The sounds. The ones you don't exactly hear. I'm right, aren't I, Eames?"

Eames didn't reply. Fischer found himself smiling.

As they sat at a light, Eames again met his eyes in the mirror. "Enjoying this, aren't you?"

A sourness in his expression. A bit of grumble in his tone. Just enough.

"Yes," said Fischer, keeping a strong, savage grip on their captive. "Yes, I am."

#####

#####

The first man Chris and Laemmle had caught, the burly man all in black, refused to say anything. Not a name, nothing. "Saving all your deep, dark secrets for the police, boyo?" Laemmle said, to a flat stare and sustained silence, as the man sat, blood dribbling from his Chris-beaten nostrils, in the infrequently used sitting room behind the cage-office, tied to one of the dining-area chairs.

They had more luck with his captured compatriot, the formerly shaggy man, who, having come to, said, before Chris had a chance to hit him with the introductory interrogatories— "Who are you? Who sent you?"—

"My name is Brenner. Doug Brenner. I work for—" He stopped. He gazed insouciantly up at Chris, then turned to Susan and said: "Awareness can corrupt at any level, Miss Gaumont."

She stared at him. "What?"

As he'd been unconscious when Fischer and Laemmle and Eames had brought him back to the house, as they'd searched him thoroughly for weapons before he awoke, and as he was outnumbered six to one, they hadn't bothered to tie him up. Now, he reached inside his jacket; Chris, armed with Fischer's thirty-eight, stepped forward threateningly.

Brenner obligingly put his hand back in plain sight. "Cell phone. Breast pocket," he said.

Eames held the phone up for him to see. "One step ahead of you, sweetheart."

"Number three on speed dial," Brenner said to him. He added, with a droll and toothy smile: "Please."

Eames dialed, handed Brenner the phone. With the receiver to his ear, Brenner waited through the space of possibly four rings.

"It's done," he said, then, to whoever picked up on the other end. He listened, then offered the phone to Susan. "He wants to talk to you."

#####

#####

They discreetly concealed the dream-tech machines, both PASIV and AGRESIV, when the police came to clear away their housebreakers. Eames, in the meantime, discreetly concealed himself as well, up in the second-floor double he'd claimed as a bedroom. While the police were in the house, the workroom's monitors displayed images and data entirely appropriate to Nick's architectural use of AUTO-CAD, to Chris's second life as a network-security specialist, to the one or several people in the house who were fans of vintage Warner Brothers cartoons.

When the police, and Brenner and the nameless man, had gone, still high on adrenaline, they straightened up. All except for Susan, who, to a chorus of good-natured catcalls, begged off by reason of AGRESIV-based exhaustion to catch a nap.

A nap only (and there the gentle jeering died away): she had a meeting scheduled for very early the next morning.

Fischer walked her up to her room and left her to drift off to the essays of Michel de Montaigne, while he bore away, like a blessing, the lingering warmth of a tender, long, wordless embrace.

#####

#####

She had an hour's peaceable sleep, and then, just before midnight, when the rain and snow had left the evening, at least temporarily, in the wind's sole care, Susan Gaumont left the house on Montague Street to meet with Doug Brenner's employer. Likely the employer of the extraction team they'd faced in the second dream, too. Tall and still moderately trim in a long black coat, more aged than aging but unstooped, his curly hair a lion's gold fading to gray, he was waiting for her on Waterloo Bridge.

With blue eyes weary but affectionate, he watched her approach. "Hello, Susan," he said.

"Miles," she replied, not frowning, not smiling.

"How are you?"

"I've been better. You should know that. You never seem to change," she added, reaching, and stopping at, roughly twice an arm's-length distance from him. A polite revelation as she stood there feeling keenly betrayed. She felt numb as well. "Does that mean that this isn't real? That we're dreaming now?"

"No." His expression, like his tone, was honest and wry, but sad, too. He knew he'd hurt her; he could read it in her expression, in her body language; she could tell. "It merely means I'm at an age where change is no longer worth the effort."

She turned to watch the midnight-black Thames flow toward Westminster. "You didn't return my calls."

"I wanted to give you time to learn the technology, to discover its possibilities." He joined her at the railing, stood nearly shoulder-to-shoulder with her. "To decide what to do with it. And, also, to experience the risks inherent in its use."

Susan held her ground, didn't move away. "To see if we deserved it. To see whether we would do the right thing with it."

"Yes."

"Or to leave us feeling betrayed and lost."

"You don't look very lost to me, Susan."

"You hired Brenner. Probably those bloody extractors, too. You staged the attack on the house—"

"Training, Susan. For all of you."

"Don't you have any idea what you did?" She turned on him, anger banking itself in her like a fire against the raw wind. "To the team? To Rob— to Fischer—?"

"We all have someone to pull us back from the edge."

"Mallory didn't."

His expression didn't change. But the pause that followed was long, empty, heartrending. "She did. I just didn't reach her in time."

And, just like that, like a match-flame dropped onto the river's dark smooth back, her anger flickered and was gone. "Miles, I'm sorry."

"It's alright. Shh."

Susan paused. "What about Cobb? Why did you save him?"

"When you get older, when the end is in sight, you save what you can. Revenge isn't important. Mal loved him; that's enough for me." He continued, the shoulders of their coats now united companionably against the wind: "You make a life for yourself, Susan, professionally— personally, if you like— with Mr. Fischer. Keep each other safe."

"You picked him very carefully, didn't you?" Susan said, softly, without accusation.

A trace of a smile. "Perhaps."

"What about you?"

"I have my family, my grandchildren. My teaching. I'll keep busy. The company, of course, is yours. Though you might want to alter the name slightly. Gaumont British might have something to say about it."

"Miles—"

"Take care, Susan." He leaned down, kissed her cheek.

She didn't watch him walk away.

#####

Fischer, who had been waiting for her on the north end of the bridge, walked out to meet her. He and Miles nodded to one another, politely, in passing. Susan, when he reached her, was looking westward. She didn't turn as he approached.

"Are you okay?" Fischer asked.

"No. Not really—" She caught herself. "That's it, isn't it? The word, all its permutations: none of this is _real_. That's the problem. What we feel, me for you, you for me: it's all a dream."

Fischer corrected her: "It _started _in a dream. Every moment we're together, no matter where: that's real." He turned her to face him, traced her cheek with his fingertips. "This is real."

Susan looked at him sadly. "Is it?"

"Yes." He tipped his forehead to hers. "It's worth a bit of thought anyway, isn't it? A moment or two of belief?"

She relaxed into their contact, reached to return his caress. "It is."

"I'll be heading back to Sydney soon," he said. "To propose a new division in R&D. Dream-tech, its attendant security. And the potential of conducting research in other fields using PASIV. I'll need someone I can trust to head things up."

Susan smiled slowly. "Are you offering me a job, Mr. Fischer?"

"Yes. Potentially longterm. And there's the possibility of a second position, too. One involving a lifetime contract. If you're interested."

He was asking her, in so many words, to marry him. Susan laid her hand against his jaw, looked into his eyes, kissed him tenderly. "I'll need a bit of time to think it over."

"All the time you want." Fischer drew her away from the railing. "Let's go home."

He took her hand; together, they walked off.

#####

#####

**THE END**

#####

#####

#####


End file.
